The Leaders | Cuban Missile Crisis U.S. President John F. Kennedy Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev Prime Minister of Cuba Fidel Castro White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston Digital Identifier: JFKWHP-AR6283-A. In 1960, at the age of 43, John F. Kennedy became the youngest elected President in U.S. history, during a period of growing tensions in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry. Soon after taking office in 1961, he authorized the “Bay of Pigs” invasion led by the CIA and exiles from Cuba, whose government had been overthrown by communist rebels in 1959. This failed to overthrow leader Fidel Castro, and was a major embarrassment to Kennedy. Tensions with the Soviet Union further escalated during the 1961 Berlin Crisis. These events set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 15, 1962 Kennedy was informed of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba and called a meeting of a small circle of trusted advisors (known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm).

He resisted pressure to react quickly with a surprise air strike, and took time to deliberate in secret on the possible courses of action. On October 22 the President announced a naval blockade on further arms shipments to Cuba. He then worked out an agreement with the Soviets, which involved a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, a threat to attack within 24 hours if the offer wasn’t accepted, and a secret promise to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey in four-five months. Credit: Heinz Junge, Bundesarchiv. German Federal Archive. Accession number Bild 183-B0628-0015-035. Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1953 after a power struggle following Stalin’s death, and served as Premier from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev began efforts to “de-Stalinize” Soviet society. However, in 1961 tensions between the superpowers escalated over the Berlin Crisis.

In the spring of 1962 Khrushchev made the decision to place Soviet missiles in Cuba secretly in order to give a quick boost to Soviet missile power, and to strengthen the USSR’s bargaining position regarding the Berlin question. After the missiles were discovered, Khrushchev initially maintained a hard line, expecting Kennedy to back down. However, as the President stood firm, Khrushchev reassessed the situation. Faced with the very real possibility of nuclear war, Khrushchev decided that “to save the world, we must retreat”. He agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles, in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and the President’s secret assurance that the U.S. would withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. As this American concession was not revealed publicly, the settlement was viewed by many as unfavorable to the USSR and hurt Khrushchev politically, contributing to his ouster from power in 1964. Credit: Warren K. Leffler. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. In January 1959 Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces seized power.

While the Cuban leader initially claimed this was not a communist revolution, a year later Cuba formally aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Relations with the United States deteriorated further in 1961when the U.S. supported CIA-trained anti-Castro exiles in the Bay of Pigs invasion – a failed attempt to overthrow Castro and a major blow for President Kennedy. In this context, in the summer of 1962 Castro accepted the Soviet offer to install missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to a U.S. invasion. During the crisis Castro urged Khrushchev to defend Cuba and reject American demands to withdraw the missiles. On October 27, believing a U.S. attack was imminent, Castro urged Khrushchev to initiate a nuclear first strike. Castro was excluded from the negotiations and felt that, by agreeing to withdraw the missiles, the Soviets had betrayed Cuba.

Search for: The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: America and Cuba Still Frozen in 1962 | TIME.com Latin America The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: America and Cuba Still Frozen in 1962 Raúl Castro's decision this week to let Cubans travel freely outside their communist island is a reminder of the jaded cold-war policies Washington and Havana adopted after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet standoff Send to Kindle CORBIS President Kennedy talking with aides, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Cuban Missile Crisis in Washington D.C. on Oct. 29, 1962. Follow @TIMEWorld It’s hard to attribute anything but coincidence to the fact that Cuban President Raúl Castro issued a major immigration reform on Tuesday, Oct. 16, which was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cold War’s most harrowing moment, the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the two things are nonetheless related.

Castro’s reform—eliminating the onerous exit visa requirement for Cubans who want to travel outside the communist island—is a reminder of how the missile crisis prompted both Washington and Havana to shut down movement into and out of Cuba for the past half century. And it’s one more sign among many that each side needs to put that cold-war past behind it. Eight months before Oct. 16, 1962—the day U.S. President John F. Kennedy was informed of the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida—the U.S. had already imposed a unilateral trade embargo on the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. That’s largely because Fidel, who ruled Cuba from 1959 until handing the presidency to his younger brother Raúl in 2006, had aligned his Caribbean nation with the Soviet Union. Now, by letting the Soviets use bases in Cuba to position ballistic missiles that could strike deep into the U.S.—Fidel was convinced that the Bay of Pigs invasion a year earlier was just a prelude to a larger U.S. attack on Cuba—he had further stoked Washington’s wrath.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in fact, would later recount that Fidel urged him to fire those missiles at America when Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island during the 13-day U.S.-Soviet standoff. (PHOTOS: Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: 50 Years from the Brink of Armageddon ) The crisis ended peacefully when the Soviets removed the missiles in exchange for a pledge to eventually remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. But a few months later, on top of the trade embargo, Kennedy ordered a ban on all U.S. travel to Cuba. Meanwhile, Fidel tightened restrictions on Cubans’ ability to leave the island. The embargo and the U.S. travel ban, incredibly, are still in effect—and so is the Cuban regime’s policy of using those measures as a scapegoat for the impoverished island’s economic blunders and as an excuse for the repression of political rights.

“For 50 years,” says Tomás Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group in Washington, D.C., which advocates an end to the embargo as well as democratic reform in Cuba, “both sides have continually taken measures that prevent the free flow of people, to the detriment of Cuban civil society. Now both sides are finally starting to take steps to facilitate it.” On the U.S. side, Bilbao is referring to the Obama Administration’s policy of permitting unlimited travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans with relatives on the island. But this week’s Cuba change is arguably more momentous, given how long Cubans have chafed under their government’s expensive and despised exit-visa constraints—which have forced so many of them to make perilous raft journeys across the Florida Straits. Raúl Castro, considered more pragmatic than his firebrand sibling, had been flirting with abolishing the exit visa for years as part of a reform program that last year let Cubans begin buying and selling private property like cars and homes. Now, starting Jan. 14, according to the immigration reform published Tuesday in Granma, the communist party newspaper, Cubans can freely travel abroad for as long as two years at a time.

There are of course strings if not ropes attached—no Cuban reform is ever without them. Valuable professionals like doctors are likely to be exempted, to keep the “interventionist and subversive” U.S. from “robbing [Cuban] talent,” according to Granma; and so most likely are dissidents. But the regime, which is being forced by economic crisis to lay off as many as a million state workers, may be hoping the reform will relieve some of that pressure as more Cubans not only travel but find employment outside the island and increase the level of remittances Cuba receives from abroad. Washington, meanwhile, will not only have to prepare for an onslaught of visitor visa applications in Cuba, it may have to reconsider its controversial “wet foot-dry foot” policy that grants residency and a track to citizenship for Cubans who make it onto U.S. soil. Either way, letting more Cubans visit developed economies like the U.S.

and Europe, and putting them in contact for the first time with free-market ideas and investment they can take back to the island, could help further Cuba’s so far tentative capitalist reforms and even lead to more democratization when Raúl, 81, and Fidel, 86, are gone. The travel reform in that sense is typical of Raúl’s larger bet: that economic liberalization will save and strengthen Cuba’s threadbare finances without threatening the regime’s grip on Cuba’s autocratic politics. But while that calculation worked for communist China, it’s a bigger gamble in Cuba, where communism’s viability is much more dependent on the personality cult of the Castros. Which is why it’s ultimately more in the interests of U.S. Cuba policy to drop the embargo and the constitutionally questionable travel ban, laws that even most Cuban-Americans now agree are relics that need to go. For one thing, those measures have failed, utterly, to dislodge the Castros.

As a result, engaging Cuba economically—more important, engaging the 12 million hapless Cubans who after half a century are still paying for cold-war clashes like the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis—could help lay stronger groundwork for democratization when old age finally accomplishes what U.S. sanctions couldn’t. Then again, if this is a season of 50th anniversaries, it’s also a U.S. election season—a reminder that Washington is still terrified of conservative Cuban-American voters in the swing state of Florida. A reminder that Havana still hasn’t grown beyond its anti-yanqui dogma and paranoia. A reminder that both the U.S. and Cuba are still frozen in 1962, to the detriment of the Americas. Padgett is a Miami-based journalist and TIME contributor Subscribe Popular Among Subscribers BBC - History - Historic Figures: Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) z Nikita Khrushchev, at the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty 1963. © Khrushchev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1955 until 1964, succeeding Joseph Stalin.

He presided over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born in 1894 into a poor family near Kursk in south-western Russia. He received very little formal education. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. In 1929, Khrushchev moved to Moscow to attend the Stalin Industrial Academy. In 1931, he began to work full-time for the Communist Party, rising through its ranks to become first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee in 1938. The following year he became a member of the Politburo, the highest decision-making body of the Communist Party. During World War Two, Khrushchev worked as a political commissar in the army. Stalin died in March 1953. Khrushchev became leader of the party shortly afterwards, but it took him several years to consolidate his position. In February 1956, he made a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, denouncing Stalin.

It caused a sensation in the Communist Party and in the West, although Khrushchev failed to mention his own role in the Stalinist terror. The speech initiated a campaign of 'de-Stalinisation'. Khrushchev also attempted to improve Soviet living standards and allow greater freedom in cultural and intellectual life. In the mid-1950s, he launched his 'Virgin Lands' campaign to encourage farming on previously uncultivated land in the Kazakh Republic (Kazakhstan). He invested in the Soviet space programme, resulting in the 1957 flight of Sputnik I, the first spacecraft to orbit the earth. In relations with the West, Khrushchev's period in office was marked by a series of crises - the shooting down of an American U2 spy-plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, most significantly, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Despite this, Khrushchev also attempted to pursue a policy of co-existence with the West.

This change in doctrine, together with Khrushchev's rejection of Stalinism, led to a split with Communist China in 1960. Significantly, Khrushchev was not prepared to loosen the grip of the Soviet Union on its satellite states in Eastern Europe and, in 1956, an uprising in Hungary against Communist rule was brutally suppressed. By 1964, Khrushchev had alienated much of the Soviet elite and was forced to retire by opponents led by Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev died on 11 September 1971 in Moscow. Biography: Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1953-1964.

Certainly the most colorful Soviet leader, Khrushchev is best remembered for his dramatic, oftentimes boorish gestures and "harebrained schemes" designed to attain maximum propaganda effect, his enthusiastic belief that Communism would triumph over capitalism, and the fact that he was the only Soviet leader ever to be removed peacefully from office--a direct result of the post-Stalin thaw he had instigated in 1956. A miner who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, Khrushchev was able to receive a technical education thanks to the October Revolution and became a true believer in the benefits of the workers' state. Rising through the Party's ranks, he became a member of the Central Committee in 1934 and of the Politburo in 1939. After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev became the Party's First Secretary in the collective leadership that emerged after it had eliminated Lavrenti Beria and his faction.

Subsequently, he used Stalin's established technique to divide and conquer his rivals, replace them with his own people, and emerge as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, with the difference that he did not kill these people, but had them assigned to such faraway and harmless posts as Ambassador to Mongolia. In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev stunned the delegates with his so-called "secret speech", during which he denounced the excesses of the Stalin era and Stalin's personality cult for six hours. Until the speech, it was still considered taboo to say anything negative about Stalin. Khrushchev's speech seems somewhat mild in hindsight, now that the scale of the horrors of the Great Purges and the Gulag are well known. At the time, however, his revelations (limited only to Stalin's crimes against the Party, not the country at large) were earth shattering. Khrushchev honestly believed in the superiority of Communism, and felt that it was only a matter of time before it would destroy the Capitalist system once and for all.

He set bold (and ultimately unattainable) goals of "overtaking the West" in food production, initiating massive programs to put vast tracts of virgin lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under the plow with the help of thousands of urban Komsomol volunteers who brought little but their enthusiasm with them to the open steppes. Despite being hailed as an expert on agriculture, Khrushchev miscalculated when, after a trip to Iowa in 1959, he became a huge enthusiast of corn and decided to introduce it to his country, most of which has an unsuitable climate. On the industrial front, Khrushchev relaxed Stalin's emphasis on military production somewhat, resulting in a wider array of consumer goods and an improved standard of living for ordinary Soviet citizens. Another one of the achievements of Khrushchev's post-Stalin "thaw" was a relaxation of the political climate, in particular censorship. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Solzhenitsyn's tale of life in the Gulag camps, was published in 1961 at Khrushchev's personal behest, and an entire dissident movement of writers and intellectuals appeared.

While they were persecuted and had to function underground, this was still a major change, since any dissidents whatsoever simply would not have remained alive under Stalin. In foreign affairs, Khrushchev also enthusiastically set lofty but often-unattainable goals, and enjoyed dramatically snubbing the West. He flew to a summit in London in a half-completed prototype of a passenger jet to demonstrate the advanced state of Soviet aviation (duly impressing his hosts, who did not have a comparable plane yet at the time). Communism's appeal spread rapidly throughout the decolonizing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the Soviet Union lavished aid for splashy projects such as dams and stadiums. The stunning propaganda coup scored by the Soviet Union in launching the first satellite, Sputnik, was followed by greater and greater achievements, such as the first dog, the first man, and the first woman in space. Many in the West began to fear that the Soviets really were catching up and soon would overtake them.

Khrushchev's enthusiasm for flashy gestures had not been liked by more conservative elements from the very start; many Soviets were greatly embarrassed by his antics, such as banging a shoe on the podium during a speech to the UN General Assembly. There were elements in the Party who were actively looking for an opportunity to oust him. Their opportunity came with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In yet another case of showmanship that he was unable to back up with deeds, in 1962 Khrushchev deployed nuclear missiles in newly Communist Cuba, within easy striking distance of most major American population centers. Thanks to intelligence received from Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet double agent, the United States was aware that the missiles were still only partially developed and did not pose an immediate threat. President John Kennedy called Khrushchev's bluff, and the latter was forced to remove the missiles from Cuba, with great loss of face both at home and abroad. Khrushchev never regained his prestige after the incident, and was quietly ousted two years later by opponents in the Politburo--significantly, with no bloodshed.

He spent the rest of his life in peaceful retirement, and was the only Soviet leader not to be buried in the Kremlin wall after his death. Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev Primary Sources Nikita Khrushchev, the grandson of a serf and the son of a coal miner, was born in Kalinovka, Ukraine on 5th April, 1894. After a brief formal education Khrushchev found work as a pipe fitter in Yuzovka. During the First World War Khrushchev became involved in trade union activities and after the October Revolution joined the Bolsheviks . In January, 1919, Khrushchev joined the Red Army and fought against the Whites in the Ukraine during the Civil War . After leaving the army he returned to Yuzovka where he returned to school to finish his education. Khrushchev remained active in the Communist Party and in 1925 was employed as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk.

Lazar Kaganovich , the general-secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was impressed with Khrushchev and invited him to accompany him to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. With the support of Kaganovich, Khrushchev made steady progress in the party hierarchy. In 1938 Khrushchev became secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and was employed by Joseph Stalin to carry out the Great Purge in the Ukraine. The following year he became a full member of the Politburo. Khrushchev and Stalin Khrushchev was aware that he had to be very careful in his dealings with Stalin: "Even though I agreed with Stalin completely, I knew I had to watch my step in answering him. One of Stalin's favourite tricks was to provoke you into making a statement - or even agreeing with a statement - which showed your true feelings about someone else. It was perfectly clear to me that Stalin and Beria were very close. To what extent this friendship was sincere, I couldn't say, but I knew it was no accident that Beria had been Stalin's choice for Yezhov's replacement." Khrushchev also worked closely with Lavrenti Beria .

"Beria and I started to see each other frequently at Stalin's. At first I liked him. We had friendly chats and even joked together quite a lot, but gradually his political complexion came clearly into focus. I was shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocrisy." Second World War After the invasion of Poland in 1940 Khrushchev was given the responsibility of suppressing the Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. When the German Army invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Khrushchev arranged the evacuation of much of the region's industry. During the Second World War Khrushchev granted the rank lieutenant general, and was given the task of organizing guerrilla warfare in the Ukraine against the Germans. When the German Army retreated in 1944 Khrushchev was once again placed in control of the Ukraine and the rebuilding of the region. Khrushchev job was made more difficult by the famine of 1946. This brought him into conflict with Joseph Stalin who accused Khrushchev of concentrating too much on feeding the people living of the Ukraine rather than exporting food to the rest of the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev was demoted in 1951 and replaced as the minister responsible for agriculture. On the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Gregory Malenkov became both prime minister and head of the Communist Party. He appeared to be a reformer and called for a higher priority to be given to consumer goods. He later argued that he was not fully aware of the crimes committed by Stalin: "I still mourned Stalin as an extraordinary powerful leader. I knew that his power had been exerted arbitrarily and not always in the proper direction, but in the main Stalin's strength, I believed, had still been applied to the reinforcement of Socialism and to the consolidation of the gains of the October Revolution. Stalin may have used methods which were, from my standpoint, improper or even barbaric, but I hadn't yet begun to challenge the very basis of Stalin's claim to a special honour in history. However, questions were beginning to arise for which I had no ready answer. Like others, I was beginning to doubt whether all the arrests and convictions had been justified from the standpoint of judicial norms. But then Stalin had been Stalin.

Even in death he commanded almost unassailable authority, and it still hadn't occurred to me that he had been capable of abusing his power." First Secretary of the Communist Party In September, 1953, Khrushchev became first secretary of the Communist Party. He arranged for the execution of Lavrenti Beria , head of the Secret Police and gradually he gained control of the party machinery. In 1955 he joined with Nikolai Bulganin to oust Gregory Malenkov from power. He also decided to condemn Stalin's period of rule in the Soviet Union. During the 20th Party Congress in February, 1956, Khrushchev launched an attack on the rule of Joseph Stalin . He argued: " Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient co-operation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.

This was especially true during the period following the 17th Party Congress, when many prominent Party leaders and rank-and-file Party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism." Khrushchev condemned the Great Purge and accused Stalin of abusing his power. During the speech he suggested that Stalin had ordered the assassination of Sergy Kirov . Later Khrushchev launched an investigation into the assassination of Kirov and other Stalin crimes. However, according to one insider, Feliks Chuev , the Shvernik Commission "found nothing against Stalin" but "Khrushchev refused to publish it - it was of no use to him." In the summer of 1956 Gregory Malenkov , Nikolai Bulganin , Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich attempted to oust Khrushchev This was unsuccessful and Khrushchev now purged his opponents in the Communist Party. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of those who supported Khrushchev's actions: "Khrushchev's secret speech at the XXth Party Congress caused a political and psychological shock throughout the country.

At the Party krai committee I had the opportunity to read the Central Committee information bulletin, which was practically a verbatim report of Khrushchev's words. I fully supported Khrushchev's courageous step. I did not conceal my views and defended them publicly. But I noticed that the reaction of the apparatus to the report was mixed; some people even seemed confused." De-Stalinzation Khrushchev's de-Stalinzation policy encouraged people living in Eastern Europe to believe that he was willing to give them more independence from the Soviet Union. In Hungary the prime minister Imre Nagy removed state control of the mass media and encouraged public discussion on political and economic reform. Nagy also released anti-communists from prison and talked about holding free elections and withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact . Khrushchev became increasingly concerned about these developments and on 4th November 1956 he sent the Red Army into Hungary . During the Hungarian Uprising an estimated 20,000 people were killed. Nagy was arrested and replaced by the Soviet loyalist, Janos Kadar . Imre Nagy was imprisoned and executed in 1958.

In 1958 Khrushchev replaced Gregory Malenkov as prime minister and was now the undisputed leader of both state and party. In the Soviet Union he promoted reform of the Soviet system and began to place an emphasis on the production of consumer goods rather than on heavy industry. Khrushchev eased censorship in the Soviet Union and allowed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to be published. Some pointed out that this was part of his de-Stalinization policy and did not reflect a genuine increase in freedom. His critics pointed out that books such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak were still banned. In 1959 Khrushchev announced a change in foreign policy. In 1959 visited the United States and offered "the capitalist countries peaceful competition". Khrushchev was due to attend the Paris Summit Conference in 1960 when a reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. He cancelled the meeting and later that year at the Union Nations he attacked Western influence in the Congo. When John F. Kennedy replaced Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States he was told about the CIA plan to invade Cuba .

Kennedy had doubts about the venture but he was afraid he would be seen as soft on communism if he refused permission for it to go ahead. Kennedy's advisers convinced him that Castro was an unpopular leader and that once the invasion started the Cuban people would support the ClA-trained forces. Khrushchev and Kennedy On April 14, 1961, B-26 planes began bombing Cuba's airfields. After the raids Cuba was left with only eight planes and seven pilots. Two days later five merchant ships carrying 1,400 Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay of Pigs . The attack was a total failure. Two of the ships were sunk, including the ship that was carrying most of the supplies. Two of the planes that were attempting to give air-cover were also shot down. Within seventy-two hours all the invading troops had been killed, wounded or had surrendered. At the beginning of September 1962, U-2 spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was building surface-to-air missile (SAM) launch sites. There was also an increase in the number of Soviet ships arriving in Cuba which the United States government feared were carrying new supplies of weapons.

President Kennedy complained to the Soviet Union about these developments and warned them that the United States would not accept offensive weapons (SAMs were considered to be defensive) in Cuba. On September 27, a CIA agent in Cuba overheard Castro's personal pilot tell another man in a bar that Cuba now had nuclear weapons. U-2 spy-plane photographs also showed that unusual activity was taking place at San Cristobal. However, it was not until October 15 that photographs were taken that revealed that the Soviet Union was placing long range missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy's first reaction to the information about the missiles in Cuba was to call a meeting to discuss what should be done. Fourteen men attended the meeting and included military leaders, experts on Latin America, representatives of the CIA, cabinet ministers and personal friends whose advice Kennedy valued. This group became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Over the next few days they were to meet several times. At the first meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, the CIA and other military advisers explained the situation. After hearing what they had to say, the general feeling of the meeting was for an air-attack on the missile sites.

Remembering the poor advice the CIA had provided before the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy decided to wait and instead called for another meeting to take place that evening. By this time several of the men were having doubts about the wisdom of a bombing raid, fearing that it would lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The committee was now so divided that a firm decision could not be made. Cuban Missile Crisis The Executive Committee of the National Security Council argued amongst themselves for the next two days. The CIA and the military were still in favour of a bombing raid and/or an invasion. However, the majority of the committee gradually began to favour a naval blockade of Cuba. Kennedy accepted their decision and instructed Theodore Sorensen , a member of the committee, to write a speech in which Kennedy would explain to the world why it was necessary to impose a naval blockade of Cuba. As well as imposing a naval blockade, Kennedy also told the air-force to prepare for attacks on Cuba and the Soviet Union. The army positioned 125,000 men in Florida and was told to wait for orders to invade Cuba.

If the Soviet ships carrying weapons for Cuba did not turn back or refused to be searched, a war was likely to begin. Kennedy also promised his military advisers that if one of the U-2 spy planes were fired upon he would give orders for an attack on the Cuban SAM missile sites. The world waited anxiously. A public opinion poll in the United States revealed that three out of five people expected fighting to break out between the two sides. There were angry demonstrations outside the American Embassy in London as people protested about the possibility of nuclear war. Demonstrations also took place in other cities in Europe. However, in the United States, polls suggested that the vast majority supported Kennedy's action. On October 24, President John F. Kennedy was informed that Soviet ships had stopped just before they reached the United States ships blockading Cuba. That evening Khrushchev sent an angry note to Kennedy accusing him of creating a crisis to help the Democratic Party win the forthcoming election. On October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy another letter. In this he proposed that the Soviet Union would be willing to remove the missiles in Cuba in exchange for a promise by the United States that they would not invade Cuba.

The next day a second letter from Khrushchev arrived demanding that the United States remove their nuclear bases in Turkey. While the president and his advisers were analyzing Khrushchev's two letters, news came through that a U-2 plane had been shot down over Cuba. The leaders of the military, reminding Kennedy of the promise he had made, argued that he should now give orders for the bombing of Cuba. Kennedy refused and instead sent a letter to Khrushchev accepting the terms of his first letter. Khrushchev agreed and gave orders for the missiles to be dismantled. Eight days later the elections for Congress took place. The Democrats increased their majority and it was estimated that Kennedy would now have an extra twelve supporters in Congress for his policies. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the first and only nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The event appeared to frighten both sides and it marked a change in the development of the Cold War . The Military and the leaders of the Communist Party felt humiliated by Khrushchev climbdown over Cuba. His agricultural policy was also a failure and the country was forced to import increasing amounts of wheat from Canada and the United States.

On 14th October, 1964, the Central Committee forced Khrushchev to resign. He lived in retirement in Moscow where he wrote his memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers (1971). Nikita Khrushchev died on 11th September, 1971. Nikita Khrushchev - History Learning Site Nikita Khrushchev Citation: C N Trueman "Nikita Khrushchev" historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 9 Mar 2015. 16 Aug 2016. Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 . When Khrushchev backed down and removed Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, his credibility was in tatters within the Soviet Union’s political hierarchy and it was only a matter of time before he was edged out of office. Nikita Khrushchev was born in 1894 at Kalinovka near to the Ukraine border. He was the son of a mineworker.

Such a background politicised Khrushchev and he fought for the Red Army during the Russian Civil War . After the Bolshevik success in this and with the war ending, Khrushchev became a miner. While working as a miner, he continued his education by attending high school. Khrushchev worked for the Communist Party in Kiev and then in Moscow. While in the capital, he gained a reputation for efficiency and in 1935 Khrushchev was appointed Secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee. He would have needed the support of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to have held such a post. Khrushchev further enhanced his reputation by being very closely associated with the building of the Moscow Underground – the construction of which was deemed an engineering success and a sign to the world of Soviet skills that were more closely associated with the West. While it was the engineers who were rightly credited with the success of this project, the managerial skills of Khrushchev within such a prestigious project were also recognised. Between 1938 and 1947, Khrushchev was mainly involved in affairs that affected the Ukraine.

During World War Two , Khrushchev assisted military commanders fighting there, primarily in the Kursk Salient. Khrushchev was Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic from the time the Nazis were expelled to 1947. In 1947, Stalin selected Khrushchev to reorganise the Soviet Union’s agricultural production. There can be little doubt that Stalin trusted his ability and by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev was a member of the Communist Party’s Presidium. On September 12th 1953, he was appointed First Secretary of the Party. Such a position allowed Khrushchev to build up supporters throughout the Party’s administrative machinery and to develop his power base. He used his influence to get Bulganin, his nominee, elected as Premier in February 1955. Few doubted that while Bulganin was the political figurehead of the USSR, the man with the real power was Khrushchev. In January 1956, Khrushchev made his boldest move for power.

At the 20th Party Congress he attacked Stalin and the ‘cult of personality’ he had developed. The 1956 Suez Crisis diverted the West’s attention away from the USSR for a short time while the USSR’s grip on the Warsaw Pact was increased when Hungary was invaded and the short-lived uprising brutally suppressed. On March 27th 1958, Khrushchev became Premier of the USSR while he continued to hold the post of First Secretary after Bulganin was effectively pushed to one side. Khrushchev gave the appearance of wanting to introduce a thaw in the Cold War and his appointment was greeted with cautious optimism in the West, especially after the austere rule of Stalin. However, his seeming feelers for peace were mixed with more hostile statements and Khrushchev became a hard man to predict – whether it was taking off his shoe and banging it on a table as he did at the UN to emphasise a point he was making or storming out of an international meeting in Geneva leaving others sitting there without the leader of the world’s second most powerful nation. Yet this was also the man who within his own country went out to meet the people – something Stalin never did.

Whether his posturing on the international stage was mere showmanship is difficult to tell – however, it was certainly unusual in an age when diplomatic work was carried out invariably in a genteel manner and ‘by the book’. Whether Khrushchev was a ‘hawk’ or a ‘dove’ is also difficult to tell. After the Cuban Missile Crisis most, if not all, assumed he was a ‘hawk’. However, this may not have been an accurate assessment. Khrushchev, along with many other members of the Politburo, was angered that America had placed military equipment, including B52 bombers, in Turkey. However, as Turkey was a member of NATO, from the West’s point of view, this was entirely legal and acceptable. To the Soviet Union it was provocative behaviour as Turkey shared a border with the USSR. When Khrushchev had the opportunity to counter this by placing medium range nuclear missiles in Cuba, he took it. He argued that they gave the Communist Caribbean island greater protection against another Bay of Pigs incident. During the crisis, Khrushchev gave no indication of climbing down against J F Kennedy.

When he did, it greatly weakened his political position at home despite his arguments that he had got America to promise never to invade Cuba. His colleagues in Moscow were also very concerned that the traditional positive relationship between the USSR and Communist China was also deteriorating and that border issues might spark off a Sino-Soviet war. Khrushchev was levered out of office in October 1964 and succeeded by Alexei Kosygin , as Prime Minister, and Leonid Brezhnez as Party Leader. Khrushchev spent the rest of his years in retirement and died in 1971. SparkNotes: The Cold War (1945–1963): Key People & Terms Key People & Terms The Cold War (1945–1963) History SparkNotes The Postwar World: 1945–1949 People Allen Dulles The director of the CIA under Eisenhower, who advocated extensive use of covert operations. Most notable among Dulles’s initiatives were U.S.-sponsored coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, which installed pro-American governments in order to curb potential expansion of Communism.

Although Eisenhower favored such covert operations because they were relatively low-cost and attracted little attention, the coups in Iran and Guatemala proved rather transparent and caused international anger toward the United States. John Foster Dulles Secretary of state under Eisenhower (and brother of Allen Dulles) who helped devise Eisenhower’s New Look foreign policy. Dulles’s policy emphasized massive retaliation with nuclear weapons. In particular, Dulles advocated the use of nuclear weapons against Ho Chi Minh’s Communist forces in Vietnam. Dwight D. Eisenhower A World War II hero and former supreme commander of NATO who became U.S. president in 1953 after easily defeating Democratic opponent Adlai E. Stevenson. Eisenhower expanded New Deal–era social welfare programs such as Social Security and passed the landmark Federal Highway Act to improve national transportation. However, he cut back funding to other domestic programs to halt what he called “creeping socialism.” His New Look at foreign policy, meanwhile, emphasized nuclear weapons and the threat of massive retaliation against the Soviet Union in order to cut costs and deter the USSR from spreading Communism abroad. Eisenhower committed federal dollars to fighting Communists in Vietnam, resolved the Suez crisis, and authorized CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala.

Ho Chi Minh The nationalist, Communist leader of the Viet Minh movement, which sought to liberate Vietnam from French colonial rule throughout the 1950s. After being rebuffed by the United States, Ho received aid from the USSR and won a major victory over French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This French defeat forced the Geneva Conference of 1954, which split Vietnam into Communist-dominated North Vietnam and French-backed South Vietnam. John F. Kennedy The thirty-fifth U.S. president, who set out to expand social welfare spending with his New Frontier program. Kennedy was elected in 1960, defeating Republican Richard M. Nixon. Feeling that their hands were tied by Eisenhower’s policy of “massive retaliation,” Kennedy and members of his foreign policy staff devised the tactic of “flexible response” to contain Communism. Kennedy sent “military advisors” to support Ngo Dinh Diem’s corrupt regime in South Vietnam and formed the Alliance for Progress to fight poverty and Communism in Latin America. He also backed the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which ultimately led to the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1963, after Kennedy had spent roughly 1,000 days in office, he was assassinated, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took office. Nikita Khrushchev The head of the Soviet Communist Party and leader of the USSR from 1958 until the early 1960s. Initially, many Americans hoped Khrushchev’s rise to power would lead to a reduction in Cold War tensions. Khrushchev toured the United States in 1959 and visited personally with President Eisenhower at Camp David, Maryland. The U-2 incident and 1962 Cuban missile crisis, however, ended what little amity existed between the two nations and repolarized the Cold War. Party leaders, upset with Khrushchev for having backed down from the Cuban missile crisis, removed him from power in 1964. Douglas MacArthur Five-star American general who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, MacArthur led the American occupation in Japan, helped establish a democratic government there, and in large part rewrote the country’s new constitution outlawing militarism.

He later commanded United Nations forces in Korea, driving North Korean forces back north of the 38th parallel after making the brilliant Inchon landing. He ignored Chinese warnings not to approach the North Korean–Chinese border at the Yalu River, however, and was subsequently driven back down to the 38th parallel by more than a million Chinese troops. President Harry S Truman later rejected MacArthur’s request to bomb North Korea and China with nuclear weapons. MacArthur’s public criticism of the president’s decision prompted Truman to remove him from command in 1951. Joseph McCarthy Republican senator from Wisconsin who capitalized on Cold War fears of Communism in the early 1950s by accusing hundreds of government employees of being Communists and Soviet agents. Although McCarthy failed to offer any concrete evidence to prove these claims, many Americans fully supported him. He ruined his own reputation in 1954 after humiliating himself during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Disgraced, he received an official censure from the Senate and died an alcoholic in 1957.

Gamal Abdel Nasser The nationalist, Communist-leaning president of Egypt who seized the British-controlled Suez Canal in 1956, after economic aid negotiations among Egypt, Great Britain, and the United States fell apart. Nasser’s action precipitated the Suez crisis, in which Eisenhower uncharacteristically backed the Communist-leaning Nasser and cut off all oil exports to Great Britain and France. Richard M. Nixon Republican congressman from California who rose to national fame as a prominent member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s when he successfully prosecuted Alger Hiss for being a Communist. Nixon later served as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. He lost his own bid for the presidency against John F. Kennedy in 1960 but defeated his Democratic opponent eight years later and became president in 1969. Harry S Truman Vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt who became president upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 and successfully carried out the remainder of World War II.

Truman was instrumental in creating a new international political and economic order after the war, helping to form the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. His Marshall Plan also helped Western Europe rebuild after the war and surpass its prewar levels of industrial production. Determined not to let the Soviet Union spread Communism, Truman adopted the idea of containment, announcing his own Truman Doctrine in 1947. His characterization of the Soviet Union as a force of “ungodly” evil helped shape the Cold War of the next four decades. He also led the nation into the Korean War but eventually fired General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination. Terms Army-McCarthy Hearings Congressional hearings that took place in 1954 as a result of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy accusing ranking U.S. Army officers of being Communists and Soviet spies. Tens of millions of Americans watched the televised courtroom proceedings as McCarthy publicly humiliated himself without offering a shred of evidence. The hearings earned McCarthy an official censure from his fellow senators, finished his political career, and effectively ended the Red hunts. Bay of Pigs Invasion President John F.

Kennedy’s failed plan to invade Cuba and topple revolutionary leader Fidel Castro with an army of CIA-trained Cuban exiles in 1961. Although Kennedy had originally intended to use the U.S. Air Force to help the exiled Cubans retake the island, he unexpectedly withdrew support shortly before the operation started. As a result, the invasion failed utterly, actually consolidated Castro’s power, and pushed Cuba into signing a treaty with the Soviet Union. Berlin Airlift The dropping of thousands of tons of food and medical supplies to starving West Berliners after Joseph Stalin closed off all highway and railway access to the city in mid-1948. Stalin hoped to cut off British, French, and American access to the conquered German city, but President Harry S Truman, determined not to lose face or the city, ordered American military planes to drop provisions from the air. The blockade was foiled, and Stalin finally lifted it in 1949. Containment A U.S. foreign policy doctrine that argued that the Soviet Union needed to be “contained” to prevent the spread of Communism throughout the world.

First formulated by State Department analyst George Kennan during the Truman administration, it suggested that the United States needed to fight Communism abroad and promote democracy (or at least anti-Communist regimes) worldwide. Policy makers tied it closely with the domino theory. Kennan’s idea eventually developed into the single most important tenet of American foreign policy through the Cold War until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuban Missile Crisis The crisis that occurred when Cuban leader Fidel Castro sought economic and military assistance from the Soviet Union after the United States’ failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, capitalized on the failed invasion, allied with Castro, and secured from Castro the right to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. Upon learning of the missiles, President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island in 1962 and demanded that Khrushchev remove them. Nuclear war seemed imminent until Khrushchev finally backed down, promising to remove the missiles if Kennedy ended the blockade. The United States complied and also agreed to remove from Turkey nuclear missiles aimed at the USSR.

The Communist Party leadership in the USSR removed Khrushchev from power in 1964 for having backed down in the standoff. Dien Bien Phu A site in Vietnam where an important French outpost fell to Ho Chi Minh’s pro-Communist forces in 1954. After this defeat, an international conference in Geneva split Vietnam into two nations—North Vietnam and South Vietnam—with the dividing line at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh established a government in the city of Hanoi in North Vietnam, while U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem took control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. Domino Theory The belief that if the United States allowed one country to fall to Communism, then many more would follow suit, like a row of dominoes. Many foreign policy thinkers subscribed to this theory at the height of the Cold War, and this led the United States to support anti-Communist regimes throughout the world, whether or not they upheld democratic ideals. The domino theory also provided the primary rationale behind Lyndon Johnson’s massive escalation of the conflict in Vietnam to full-scale war.

Flexible Response A doctrine of containment that provided for a variety of military and political strategies that the president could use to stem the spread of Communism. The flexible response plan was developed by Defense and State Department officials in the Kennedy administration who felt that Eisenhower’s “massive retaliation” doctrine restricted the president’s options too much. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) A committee established in 1938 by the House of Representatives to investigate individual Americans or organizations who might be linked to the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. After World War II, as fear of the Soviet Union spread, HUAC was used to investigate those suspected of having ties to Communism or of being Soviet agents. Congressman Richard M. Nixon played a key role on the committee and used his power to prosecute many, including federal employee Alger Hiss in 1950. Marshall Plan A plan devised by President Harry S Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall that committed over $10 billion to rebuilding Western Europe after World War II. Although the Soviet Union fiercely opposed the plan, Truman knew that rebuilding the region would provide stability and prevent another world war.

The Marshall Plan was highly successful and enabled British, French, Italian, and German factories to exceed prewar production levels within just a few years. Massive Retaliation A primary component of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s New Look foreign policy that threatened massive nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union for any Communist aggression abroad. Designed to save the U.S. government money on defense spending, this policy effectively tied Eisenhower’s hands because it limited his options when addressing smaller crises, such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Kennedy later dropped the threat of massive retaliation in favor of the doctrine of “flexible response,” which gave the president more options. Montgomery G.I. Bill A bill passed in 1944 that provided federal grants for education to returning World War II veterans. Also known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, the bill also awarded federal loans to vets to purchase new homes, farms, and businesses. Millions of veterans took advantage of these grants and loans to go back to school and purchase new suburban homes, making the act one of the most significant pieces of postwar legislation. National Security Act An act passed in 1947 that reorganized the U.S.

military and espionage services in order to better meet the Soviet threat. The act placed the armed forces under the new secretary of defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff and also created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council to advise the president. National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68) A classified 1950 proposal that the United States quadruple defense and military spending in order to counter the Soviet threat. NSC-68 set a precedent for increasing defense spending throughout the Cold War, especially after North Korean forces attacked South Korea in June 1950. New Frontier Kennedy’s collective bundle of domestic policies, which called for increased social welfare spending to tackle the growing poverty rate. Opposition in Congress from Republicans and southern Democrats, however, blocked the passage of most New Frontier legislation. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) An organization formed in 1949 that bound the United States, Canada, most of Western Europe, and later Greece and Turkey together in a mutual pact of defense against the USSR and Eastern bloc countries. The treaty had the additional effect of permanently tying American interests to political and economic stability in Europe.

Red Hunts The wrongful persecutions of thousands of Americans for being Communists or Soviet spies that took place in the 1940s and 1950s and were led by the Loyalty Review Board and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Congressman Richard Nixon, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and others led these Communist “witch hunts,” often without any shred of evidence. Liberal playwright Arthur Miller, himself among the accused Communists, criticized the Red hunts and McCarthyism in his critically acclaimed play The Crucible, which dealt with the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century New England. Space Race The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for primacy in the exploration of outer space. The space race was prompted by the USSR’s launch of the first orbiting space satellite, Sputnik I , in 1957. The Sputnik launch prompted President Eisenhower to form NASA and Kennedy to push for a lunar landing by the end of the 1960s. Sputnik I and Sputnik II The first orbiting space satellites, launched by the Soviet Union beginning in 1957.

The launch of these satellites astonished the world and scared many Americans into believing that the USSR had the capability to attack the United States with long-range nuclear missiles. President Eisenhower responded by forming the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to coordinate American endeavors to explore space. Congress also passed the National Defense Education Act, which provided more federal dollars for science and foreign language instruction in public schools. American and Soviet competition to explore space quickly became known as the space race. Suez Crisis The crisis that erupted after Egypt’s nationalization of the British-controlled Suez Canal, which took place in 1956 after negotiations over international aid among the United States, Great Britain, and Egypt collapsed. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, which links the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Although Eisenhower protested the move, he also condemned the joint British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt to retake the canal. The three nations eventually halted their attack and withdrew, under heavy diplomatic and economic pressure from the United States. Truman Doctrine A doctrine articulated by President Harry S Truman that pledged American support for all “free peoples” fighting Communist aggression from foreign or domestic sources.

Truman announced the doctrine in 1947, then convinced Congress to grant Greece and Turkey $400 million to help fight pro-Soviet insurgents. Besides committing the United States to the policy of containment, the language of the Truman Doctrine itself help characterize the Cold War as a conflict between good and evil. U-2 Incident The crisis that arose after the USSR shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying over the USSR on a reconnaissance mission in 1960. President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially denied that the incident occurred until Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev presented the captured American pilot. The president’s refusal to apologize or halt future spy missions caused the collapse of a joint summit among Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR in May 1960. Warsaw Pact A pact signed by the USSR and Eastern European countries under Soviet influence in 1955. By signing the pact, they pledged mutual defense in response to the formation of NATO.

Cuban missile crisis, 1962 - Photos - A look back at the Cuban Missile Crisis - NY Daily News A look back at the Cuban Missile Crisis A look back at the Cuban Missile Crisis In 1962 the world was on edge, worried that the Cuban missile crisis -- a standoff between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union -- could end in nuclear war. A look back at the Cuban Missile Crisis 4 | 14 Cuban missile crisis, 1962 Another aerial view shows more medium-range missile bases in Cuba, taken on Oct. 23, 1962. On Oct. 28, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Russian missiles would be dismantled. AFP/Getty Images Nikita Khrushchev Essay Examples | Kibin Nikita Khrushchev Essay Examples An Analysis of the Literature by Sergei Krushchev The Day We Shot Down The U-2 This author Sergei Khrushchev gives us a glimpse into the events surrounding the "secret" U-2 flights that the U.S. was conducting.

In the 1950's the Cold War was going strong between the United States and the Soviet Union. This led to a lot of tension between the two countries... 625 words Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894-1971), Soviet Communist leader, who was first secretary of the Soviet Communist party from 1953 to 1964 and premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1958 to 1964. Born in Kalinovka, the son of a miner, Khrushchev worked in his early years as a shepherd and locksmith... An Analysis of Nikita Khrushchev Who Rose To Power After the Death of Stalin Nikita Khrushchev rose to power after the death of Stalin. He was a leader who desperately worked for reform yet his reforms hardly ever accomplished their goals. He was a man who praised Stalin while he was alive but when Stalin died Khrushchev was the first to publicly denounce him. Khrushchev came to power in 1953 and st...

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Question: Who was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Answer: Nikita Khrushchev