Dr. Barton Bernstein spoke to my Peace and Conflict Capstone class today, and I think it was the most informative class of the semester.  He spoke almost exclusively on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we had barely touched on before this point.  Having taken Dr. Hilderbrand’s, "American History of the 1960s" class, I felt that I had a decent grasp on the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Dr. Bernstein's speech clarified some points and opened my thoughts to all new ones.  Three things in Dr. Bernstein's lecture particularly caught my attention.  The first was that the Soviets moved the missiles to Cuba as a defensive action, as opposed to an offensive action.  The second was that the crisis was ended not by Kennedy staring down the Soviets, but in fact through diplomatic negotiations.  The third was that the Cuban Missile Crisis may have been part of the reason why the United States stayed involved in the Vietnam Conflict a decade later.

The first point is of absolute importance.  The United States reacted the way that it did due to the fact that they perceived the move to be the first step toward an offensive action against them by the Soviets.  In fact, according to Dr. Bernstein, the Soviets knew the number of missiles the United States had, and were extremely outnumbered (almost nine to one), and so they thought it would be an important defensive measure to move shorter range ballistic missiles into Cuba as a way of somewhat leveling the playing field with the United States.  Knowing how severely outnumbered they would be in a nuclear war, there is no possible way that the Soviet Union was planning a first strike against the United States.  If the United States would have had the same access to the number of Soviet missiles as the Russians did to the number of US Missiles, they would've seen that such an attack would be suicide by the Russians. 

The second point I took from Dr. Bernstein's lecture to my class was that it was diplomatic talks and negotiations which brought the Cuban Missile Crisis to an end, not, as was believed for so long, that JFK stood up to the Soviets and won.  JFK cut a private deal with the Soviets to remove the United State's missiles from Turkey within four months after all missiles had been removed form Cuba.  This deal removed shorter range missiles from both countries, but the time delay made JFK look to have won against the Soviets.  He did not have to show the rest of the world that he had cut a deal with the Russians, and both sides still got what they wanted.  This became one of the best kept secrets of the Kennedy Administration.  It was so well kept, in fact, that JFK's own Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson, did not know about it.  This, according to Dr. Bernstein, would backfire on the United States in the form of the Vietnam Conflict.

One of the biggest reasons that the United States would not cut their losses and leave Vietnam was that President Lyndon B. Johnson believed that he needed to live up to the manliness of JFK, who had supposedly never backed down from anyone.  Johnson believed that Kennedy would not quit until he had won in Vietnam, so Johnson refused to quit either.  As a result of this simple misunderstanding, thousands of Americans died, and we still did not win the war.  Dr. Bernstein stated that if LBJ had known how well diplomatic relations had worked in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he might have chosen similar tactics to avoid the Conflict in Vietnam.  Who knows how many other wars may have been prevented with the knowledge of the success of diplomatic relations in Cuban Missile Crisis.

Dr. Barton Bernstein was able to open my eyes to aspects of the Cuban Missile Crisis which had not occurred to me.  While I had always realized that it was the closest the world has come to Nuclear Armageddon, I had not realized how it was seen on both sides of the crisis, how it was prevented diplomatically, or the effects of the crisis in regards to Vietnam.  Most of all, Dr. Bernstein was able to demonstrate to me that the leaders who can so carelessly lead the world to the brink of destruction are also the ones who really do occasionally make the right decisions, and bring us back to safety.