Educational Media Reviews Online

Both of these short videos succeed not only in presenting evidence that the world came closer to nuclear war in October 1962 than the major players in the U.S. government realized at the time, but also in giving the viewer an idea of what it was like to live through the Cuban Missile Crisis as a public citizen. However, one of the videos is unquestionably more compelling than the other.

What Kennedy Didn’t Know: The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited consists of a special edition of the ABC News late-night news program Nightline that aired on October 11, 2002. The program includes three segments. The first is a somewhat breathless report by George Stephanopoulos, based on recently released documents from the National Security Archives and on-camera interviews with U.S. and Soviet naval participants, chronicling that the U.S. had no clue that, during the missile crisis, four of the Soviet diesel submarines routinely hunted by the U.S. Navy in the Caribbean were each armed with one nuclear tipped torpedo and had been given orders to use them at their captain’s discretion if they were fired upon – a scenario that Kennedy advisor Ted Sorenson flatly states would have led to a U.S. response with tactical, and perhaps even strategic, nuclear weapons. Although concussive grenades from the U.S. ships rocked at least one Soviet sub, whose captain ordered a nuclear torpedo to be assembled for possible use, the situation ended without further escalation. The second segment is Barbara Walters’ interview with Fidel Castro in which the Cuban leader asserts that his country had no interest in housing strategic weapons as part of a worldwide balance of power between the U.S. and the Soviet Union but was convinced that they needed to accept them in order to continue their close relationship with Moscow when they were presented as a wholly defensive measure against an imminent U.S. invasion. Castro also attempts to debunk the widely held belief that he had advised Khrushchev to launch a nuclear first strike against the U.S. if Cuba were invaded, blaming the misinterpretation of his letter to Khrushchev on poor translating. The final segment is Ted Koppel’s interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson who recounts the mood of Washington observers during the crisis and places the dangers demonstrated by the uncertainties faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the context of the present military actions that are taking place in the name of the war on terrorism. All in all, this is a solid, if unremarkable, Nightline broadcast and carries with it the technical quality that is expected from ABC’s flagship news program.

Voices from the Brink: The Cuban Missile Crisis relies on newly released White House tape recordings that capture the actual discussions among the top U.S. officials during the crisis; thankfully, the archival recordings were captioned (as should be all less-than-perfect audio in a documentary). Voices is less technically adroit than the Nightline program, but infinitely more compelling as history. It not only is more successful in placing the viewer at the heart of the conflict, with a sense of immediacy artfully supported by wonderful use of period footage, but also provides a fuller and more cohesive explication of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Perhaps this difference between the two programs is indicative of a fundamental difference between journalistic and documentary representations of history.) Many viewers already will know that JFK had to stand firm behind his strategy of warnings and a naval blockade against the call for an invasion of Cuba by military and Congressional leaders. More startling to most will be the audio record of how divided the Cabinet was and, most pointedly, how dismissive and derisive top military leaders were of JFK and his strategy. In addition to the archival material, Voices includes three main interviews: historian Timothy Naftali provides commentary on the negotiations that ended the crisis, Sergei Khrushchev relates what his father told him about the crisis, and, almost inevitably, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gives his pronouncement that the “…combination of human fallibility and nuclear warheads will lead to destruction of nations,” but does not discuss his espousal of air strikes and invasion as presented in the audio-recordings.