These days, say James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, even their best graduate students in political science know little, if anything, about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. “It might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars, frankly,” says Blight, a professor of foreign-policy development at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario.
Students have bought into “a fairy tale—the notion of a brief shining moment for the beautiful Kennedy family in Camelot” and of “the good guy, Kennedy,” who stared down the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, “a bad guy who made Fidel Castro let him park nuclear missiles in Cuba.”
Blight and Lang, a research professor of international affairs at Waterloo, have spent almost 30 years investigating how those events almost brought the world to nuclear war.
The latest result is The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis, just out from Rowman & Littlefield. Blight and Lang have created a companion “transmedia, multiplatform” Web site at armageddonletters.com.
In their project, Blight and Lang—longtime collaborators and marriage partners who met as graduate students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government—focus on “where things could have led if they had got out of hand,” says Lang, who prefers to spell her first name with a lowercase “j.”
Their dismay at college students’ ignorance of one of history’s most fraught moments—something they noticed during their many years at Brown University, which they left in 2009—explains their book’s unusual format. Blight and Lang’s innovations will include not only 43 actual communications among the leaders (although not between Castro and Kennedy, who were not on speaking terms), but also made-up discussions among the three leaders and their advisers: “some combination of credible oral testimony, declassified documentary evidence, and scholarly analysis,” as they put it.
The imagined conversations are in screenplay and graphic-novel form, with illustrations by Andrew Whyte, a Vancouver artist, and storyline and dialogue by Koji Masutani, who also designed the project’s Web site.
Also included are sections in which Blight and Lang, in slangy commentary, explain such aspects of the conflict as how, “pushed to the brink of Armageddon, with time running out, the three leaders communicate with a degree of candor and clarity that is astonishing.”
On the Armageddon Letters Web site, Blight, Lang, and Masutani plan to post 20 short films, narrated by a cartoon stylization of Blight, or by Blight himself, a striking figure with something of a hyperrealist presence.
By phone from Windsor, Ont., Blight says: “Some of the art is quite funky and out there, at least to people of our generation.” To students he might come off as either very much not hip or, because of his enthusiasm and intense gaze, square jaw, and crew cut, ultra-hip or even post-hip.
As they recount their project and its purpose, Blight and Lang trade overlapping comments about the Web site’s components, including podcasts and blogs with what they imagine Castro, Kennedy, and Khrushchev might have posted at the time.
It’s no surprise, then, that the authors’ primary target audience is undergraduate and high-school students. When designing the project, Blight says, they kept in mind “the edutainment requirements of people much younger than us who expect to be bombarded with information.” The two will compile high-school course materials in collaboration with a Brown University program, called Choices, that prepares history and current-affairs materials for schools.
The tension began ratcheting up 50 years ago, on September 4, 1962, when Kennedy stated that the United States would not tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, some 90 miles from Florida. Soviet leaders countered that America had missiles in Britain, Italy, and Turkey.
Blight and Lang were moved to tell the story by Robert S. McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense during the crisis. They met at a 1984 conference that Blight organized while he was director of Harvard University’s Project on Avoiding Nuclear War.
That first conference would be followed by several others, including two in Havana at which, Blight says, he and Castro got on like old pals because both had been pitchers, Blight in the Detroit Tigers farm system.
The gatherings were Blight’s first forays into what he now calls “critical oral history,” in which decision makers from key historical episodes relate their experiences while interrogated by scholars armed with declassified documents.
At that first meeting, in 1984, McNamara said, as Blight and Lang remember his words, that “a nuclear war could occur in an unexpected crisis even though none of the involved parties of the conflict desired it, or even thought it possible, at the outset of the crisis.” That remains their own conviction and the key message of their project. McNamara “all but ordered us,” write Blight and Lang, “to learn more about the actual experience of the Cuban missile crisis” from its participants, and to convey that knowledge to young Americans.
The two researchers joined other historians of the era in searching for relevant documents, including the leaders’ correspondence. The couple traveled to Moscow, Havana, Washington, and New York as “amateur shuttle diplomats.” Both trained in psychology, they came to differ with the standard account of the crisis, which attributes its resolution to rational decision-making by the leaders; instead, they see the whole period from the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961, to the missile crisis in psychological terms—as a process of each leader’s coming to understand the fears and defiance of the others.
Blight, who had hung an effigy of McNamara while an anti-Vietnam War activist in a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, found himself writing two books with the former secretary of defense.
Blight and Lang’s work around the Cuban missile crisis, often with a colleague, David Welch, has produced several other books, dozens of journal articles, and two companion volumes to documentary films on which they collaborated. Those were Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) and Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived (2008), by the animator on their current project, Koji Masutani.
The Armageddon Letters is timely not just because it marks the anniversary of the crisis, but also because, as the authors write: “After Castro dies, there will literally be no one to ask: What was it about, and what was it like, when the fate of the world hung by a thread”?
