President John F. Kennedy Tells the World That Soviet Missiles Are in Cuba (Cuban Missile Crisis, Day Seven)

President John F. Kennedy was a superb public speaker. His inaugural address is one of the best known and most frequently quoted presidential speeches. His press conference immediately after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, when he famously said that “victory has one-hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” helped blunt the political fallout from one of the biggest foreign policy fiascoes in U.S. history.

However, none of Kennedy’s previous speeches matched the importance of the one he gave on the evening of October 22, 1962, when he told the American people and the world that the Soviet Union was secretly installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.

Briefings at Home

Administration officials spent the bulk of that Monday, the seventh day of the crisis, briefing cabinet officials and senior members of Congress about the situation in Cuba. They hoped to coordinate a unified message and response to president’s speech and his decision to impose a naval quarantine on Cuba. Twenty senior lawmakers from both parties were told that the president wanted to speak with them that day. Those congressional leaders who were not in Washington were told to catch commercial flights or special flights arranged by the U.S. Air Force.

The lawmakers who made it to the White House got a personal briefing on the crisis from Kennedy late that afternoon. Not everyone liked what they heard. Democratic Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the chair of the Senate Armed Service Committee, dismissed a naval quarantine as insufficient. The United States should instead immediately launch air strikes or an invasion because, Russell argued, “It seems to me that we’re at the crossroads. We’re either a first-class power or we’re not.” 

Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and someone that Kennedy had considered appointing secretary of state, echoed Russell’s criticism. An exasperated Kennedy responded that immediate military action was both impractical and reckless. Neither senator was satisfied with the response. Kennedy held his ground.

Before speaking to congressional leaders, Kennedy called his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Director of Central Intelligence John McCone had briefed the former president on the second day of the crisis. Kennedy now wanted to tell Eisenhower personally how the United States would respond and to get his assessment of the risks of a military strike on Cuba. Eisenhower replied that Kennedy was “really making the only move you can make.” The former president added that he did not think the Soviets would fire its nuclear missiles if the United States invaded Cuba and that the presence of their missiles “on our flank” was such a threat that the United States had to act, regardless of consequences.

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjLeFIMC1FQ&source_ve_path=MTc4NDI0]

Briefings Abroad

In addition to briefing U.S. lawmakers of the crisis, Kennedy and his senior advisers were also informing the leaders of allied governments. Kennedy spoke personally by phone with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson met on Kennedy’s behalf with French President Charles de Gaulle in Paris to convey the administration’s message. Kennedy dispatched Livingston Merchant, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada, to brief Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.

The briefings with foreign leaders mostly went well. Macmillan cautioned against a reckless reaction, subsequently writing: “Many of us in Europe have lived so long in close proximity to the enemy nuclear weapons… that we have got accustomed to it.” He nonetheless confirmed that he would support Kennedy’s chosen response. De Gaulle dismissed Acheson’s offer to review the photographic evidence of Soviet duplicity by saying: “The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me.” And while de Gaulle intimated that he would have preferred to have been consulted rather than informed on the U.S. response, he stated that if the Soviets moved against the United States in places such as Berlin, “France will act in accord with you.”

The testiest briefing was with Diefenbaker. He and Kennedy had a notoriously difficult relationship, partly because of personal differences and partly because of policy ones, including over whether to break economic relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Like de Gaulle, Diefenbaker took offense at being informed rather consulted about U.S. policy. Unlike de Gaulle, he made no effort to hide his anger.

Diefenbaker initially questioned the validity of the U.S. intelligence and criticized several aspects of Kennedy’s policy and speech with what Merchant later called “skepticism bordering on antagonism.” To Kennedy’s consternation, Diefenbaker subsequently called for independent UN inspectors to examine the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy dismissed the idea out of hand. Diefenbaker also waited three days to approve raising Canada’s defense alert as Kennedy had requested and did so only after the Canadian military spotted a Soviet submarine operating five hundred miles off Canada’s coast.

A Last-Minute Scare

Kennedy received a scare just before noon when the Soviet mission to the United Nations announced that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who was wrapping up a visit to the United States, would make an important announcement. Had the Soviets learned that the United States had uncovered their secret and were now seeking to preempt the president’s speech?

Kennedy’s strategy for responding to the crisis hinged on being the first to inform the world that Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba and revealing their deception to the world. If Moscow had learned that he was about to go public with the news and announced it themselves first, Kennedy would be reacting to events rather than shaping them. That would create a host of problems at home and abroad for the White House.

To Kennedy’s relief, however, Moscow was still in the dark about what Washington knew. The important statement turned out to be routine farewell remarks that Gromyko decided to issue after bad weather delayed his plane’s departure from New York. The 3:00 p.m. meeting of the ExComm did not have to do a last-minute rewrite of Kennedy’s speech to the nation.

Informing Moscow

In the late afternoon, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, an urgent summons for a meeting. Dobrynin arrived at the State Department at 6:00 p.m. Virtually simultaneously, the U.S. embassy in Moscow handed the Soviet Foreign Ministry a copy of the speech that Kennedy planned to give one hour later along with a letter from the president to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

The letter stated Kennedy’s position bluntly: “the United States is determined that this threat to the security of this hemisphere be removed.” Dobrynin departed Rusk’s office after just twenty-five minutes looking unnerved and clutching copies of the speech and the letter. Reporters hanging out at the State Department noticed the Soviet ambassador’s agitation and pressed him on why. He responded sharply: “Ask the Secretary… you can judge for yourself.”

“A Clear and Present Danger”

At 7:00 p.m., Kennedy addressed the nation from the Oval Office. His speech had gone through five drafts and took eighteen minutes to deliver. The president told the American public that the United States had discovered “unmistakable evidence” that the Soviet Union had begun installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba in “flagrant and deliberate defiance” of both treaty obligations and Soviet assurances to the contrary. He added that Gromyko had sat in the Oval Office four days earlier and lied to his face that Moscow had not sent offensive weapons to Cuba.

Kennedy described the Soviet action as “a clear and present danger” not just to the United States but to the entire Western Hemisphere. He had no intention of looking the other way because “the 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” To that end, he announced the “initial steps” that the United States was taking. First, it was imposing:

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXFV0GkOTGA&source_ve_path=MTc4NDI0]

Kennedy went on to announce that he had ordered the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to be reinforced and he was calling for immediate meetings of the Organization of American States and the UN Security Council. He concluded by insisting that the U.S. goal was “not the victory of might, but the vindication of right—not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.”

Preparing for a Possible Escalation

Before speaking to the nation and recognizing that the Soviets could quickly escalate the crisis once he spoke, Kennedy ordered most U.S. military commands to move from Defense Condition (DEFCON) 4, the normal peacetime readiness condition, to DEFCON 3. The U.S. Strategic Air Command would subsequently go to DEFCON 2, with the armed forces meant to be ready for major conflict within six hours, for the first time ever.

Kennedy also ordered the largest defense mobilization of the postwar era to signal U.S. resolve and to be prepared for war if it came. B-47 bombers were deployed to thirty U.S. civilian airfields and nuclear weapons placed on board B-47s in Spain, Morocco, and Britain. The planes would remain on alert for a month, “flying 2,088 sorties in 48,532 continuous hours of flying time, in which over 20,022,000 miles were flown without a fatality.”

Waiting for a Response

The Cuban missile crisis was now public. Kennedy had made his move. U.S. Navy ships were getting in position to impose the quarantine. The question now was what the Soviets would do in response. The fate of the world would hinge on what came next.

Oscar Berry and Jack Patton assisted in the preparation of this article.

The United States celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026. To mark that milestone, I am resurfacing essays I have written over the years about major events in U.S. foreign policy. A version of this essay was published on October 22, 2012.

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