What would President Nixon have done during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

My guess is that Nixon was a known enough factor to the Politburo that they probably wouldn't attempt anything like what they did to Kennedy.
 
if there were a crisis I (age 6) would have died had Nixon been in office he would have taken military advice, the tactical nukes would have been used to defend the island, we would have WW3
 
I've read that in the June 1961 Vienna meeting between the two leaders that Khrushchev decided Kennedy was weak.

I've also read that this is bullshit and of the nature of an urban legend.

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If it is true, it was a serious miscalculation on Khrushchev's part because it took a strong man to hold back the U.S. military establishment and insist on continuing to look for another way besides a direct attack.
 
if there were a crisis I (age 6) would have died had Nixon been in office he would have taken military advice, the tactical nukes would have been used to defend the island, we would have WW3

Near consensus is that the USSR would have landed very few warheads on CONUS had the war gone hot.
The reverse was not the case.
From the Oder to the Pacific, Warsaw Pact Nations, the USSR and Red China would have been a collection of glassed craters. The US had ten times the warheads, and the means to deliver them.
 
I've read that in the June 1961 Vienna meeting between the two leaders that Khrushchev decided Kennedy was weak.

I've also read that this is bullshit and of the nature of an urban legend.

I am one of those who holds it was myth. To quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

***

IMO this is a myth. As Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein wrote in
*We All Lost the Cold War*:

"The widely credited story that Khrushchev took Kennedy's measure in Vienna
and found him wanting originated with James Reston of the *New York Times.*
Three-and-a-half years after the summit, he proposed it as an explanation
for the Soviet decision to send missiles to Cuba. Reston was careful to
point out that his hypothesis was speculative and based on the president's
somber mood following his meeting with Khrushchev. [Elie] Abel and others
treated the proposition as an incontrovertible fact.

"All eyewitness accounts of the summit report plain speaking between the
two leaders with neither man giving ground. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
described the conversations as 'civil but tough.' He insists that there is
no truth to 'the legend that Khrushchev browbeat and bullied Kennedy at
Vienna.' Kenneth O'Donnell, a political and personal confidant of the
president, tells the same story, as do Dean Rusk and knowledgeable Soviet
officials like Ambassador Georgiy M. Kornienko, who ridicules the notion of
Kenneday as a weak president. That 'doesn't fit at all with my impression
of how Khrushchev perceived Kennedy.'

"Khrushchev told reporters that Kennedy was tough, especially on the
question of Berlin. He confided to Kornienko that he had been right in his
assessment of Kennedy as a 'really intelligent, extraordinary politician.'
According to Sergei Khrushchev, 'Father returned to Moscow after the summit
with a very high opinion of Kennedy. He saw him as a worthy partner and
strong statesman, as well as a simple, charming man to whom he took a real
liking.' Speaking of the summit in his memoirs, Khrushchev remembered
Kennedy as a refreshing change from Eisenhower because of his thorough
preparation, frankness, and the verve with which he argued his case. 'This
was to his credit and he rose in my estimation at once. . . . He was, so to
speak, both my partner and my adversary.'"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Eaws3G98Ji0C&pg=PA71 (One thing that
impressed Khrushchev: Kennedy never consulted Rusk during the meetings as
Ike had consulted Dulles.)

(Lebow and Stein also argue that Khrushchev's decision to send missilies to
Cuba was "not the result of his low estimate of Kennedy's resolve; rather,
he decided to deploy them secretly out of respect for that resolve."
http://books.google.com/books?id=Eaws3G98Ji0C&pg=PA5 )

Likewise, Anna Tusa in *The Last Division: A History of Berlin, 1945-1989*
after noting Khrushchev's tribute to Kennedy's "precisely formulated
opinion on every subject," observes that "On reflection, Khrushchev can
hardly have been entirely pleased with the results of their meeting,
however enjoyable it might have been to score off the President for a
couple of days. His adversary had shown no signs of sympathy for his own
version of peaceful coexistence and no desire to turn Cold War swords into
ploughshares to aid Soviet technology and trade. He had failed to lure
Kennedy into negotiations over Berlin, by which he could have caused
ructions in the western alliance and weakened the allied position in the
city. He had issued a new ultimatum and, since his threats were beginning
to sound unconvincing to many friends and foes alike, he might have to act
on it and take major political and military risks. And it is probably true
to say that Khrushchev had made a serious miscalculation at Vienna. He had
made Kennedy's blood run cold, but after the initial shock the President
rallied and resolved to confront Khrushchev in Berlin..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=hlGVrPoOnRkC&pg=PA243

As Tusa notes, there is a curious divergence between the fact that
Khrushchev seems to have been impressed by Kennedy, and Kennedy's own
perception of the meeting. Kennedy was--even reading the transcripts weeks
after returning to Washington--"still shocked by Khrushchev's brutality,
though if he had compared his own experience with those of other victims,
he might have drawn the conclusion that Khrushchev had been almost
temperate by Kremlin stndards..."

If one chooses to disbelieve all these accounts rejecting the notion that
Khrushchev thought that JFK was weak, couldn't stand up to a confrontation,
etc., there is one other obvious argument against the idea: after Vienna,
Khrushchev once again did not follow through with his threat to sign a
separate peace treaty with East Germany. Instead, he built the Wall--
obviously an affront to the West (and to ordinary human decency) but
nevertheless in Khrushchev's view the least he could do to assure the
preservation of the GDR, and less likely than a separate treaty (which
would end the West's transit rights to Berlin) to provoke a war-threatening
crisis.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/ldbkcVUC8wM/HCiEOFH6aTcJ
 
A Man Is Finished When He Quits by @SargentHawk

This thread right here is an excellent example of a Nixon Cuba. What happens is that the Bay of Pigs causes Castro to die on the beaches of Cuba when a shell hits him dead center. Raul is filled with grief and orders the bombardment of Guantanimo which kills dozens of U.S soldiers. Nixon then launches a full scale invasion of Cuba and overthrows the Communist regime. Overall resulting in a better Cuba as Raul Castro dies and Che Guevera is killed as well. At the same time though this causes the Cuban missile crises to become the Turkish Missile Crises. Which ends up in the U.S appearing as the losers.
 
Nixon generally had a better handle on this kind of thing than Kennedy did. He would have either nixed the operation or done it for real and to win. Either way it butterflies the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 
yes under Nixon as POTUS the invasion of Cuba went quite different as under Kennedy Administration

If Nixon defeated Kennedy and became President, what would he have done during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
This imply that Invasion of Cuba failed and Soviets have installed MRBM on Cuba soil.

It's very likely that Nixon follow the Advice of his generals and Order the bombardment of the Missile site on Cuba follow by large scale invasion of Cuba by US military
but the Soviets military on Cuba base had there orders from Moscow:
"in case you under Attack by Americans you are free to retaliation with nuclear weapons"

and since the USAF can't destroy all nuclear missile in one bombing raid, will some US cities on east coast between Florida and New York get vaporizes
What let to nuclear counter-attack of SAC agains Soviet Union...
 
I don't know why almost everyone on here is assuming that Nixon would blindly and pigheaded-ly charge into WWIII. A mix of Kennedy glorification and Nixon demonification if I had to guess. Lets remember that in Nixon's first term in office, he showed what could amount to a masterful control of foreign policy, and did more than any other President of the era to limit nuclear arms and tensions. I'm not convinced that Nixon in '60 would be any different, and its possible that either a successful Bay of Pigs goes through, nipping the issue in the bud, or if Castro does hold power, the situation is cleared without any stand-off. Personality issues aside, Nixon in any year was a competent man.
 
I don't know why almost everyone on here is assuming that Nixon would blindly and pigheaded-ly charge into WWIII. A mix of Kennedy glorification and Nixon demonification

A President is only good if his Administration is good !
Kennedy had manage very good with his Administration, the Cuba missile Crisis despite the close calls that almost triggers World War III
Would Nixon and his Administration manage that so well also ?
He was the one behind plans for Invasion of Cuba under Eisenhower Administration
And the soviets Missile could give him a excellent justification for a Airstrike & Invasion of Cuba.


Recommend Reading and Movie
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis Robert F. Kennedy's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Thirteen Days The Movie Adaptation of this book.
 
I think a little bit the feeling is that the OTL Cuban Missile Crisis was a very near thing, which went well due to good luck in large measure.

A reshuffling of the cards, you may not have the same good luck.
 
The question is really unanswerable because it is just so unlikely that Nixon would have a Cuban missile crisis to begin with. The Cuban missile crisis had so much leading into it based on JFK's actions that it is unlikely the same event would occur under Nixon. Even had Nixon invaded Cuba under the Bay of Pigs (questionable if it would have even been changed to the Bay of Pigs to begin with), Russia's ties with Cuba were nowhere near what they were just a year later.
 

CalBear

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Odds are better than even that there is no missile crisis.

The Bay of Pigs was initiated under Ike, Nixon was fully on board and much more likely to follow on with a LOT more than a few A-26s, up to and including a Marine Division out of Little Creek. Half way really wasn't in Nixon's lexicon.

On the other hand, Nixon was also much more of an internationalist than JFK thanks to his time as VP. If Khrushchev proposed the same sort of detente as he brought forward with JFK there is the possibility that the entire Cold War gets stop punched.
 
Would things also be different if Kissinger served in an earlier Nixon Administration instead of starting in 1968-69?
 
Military invasion of Cuba, leading to tactical nuclear weapon use against American landing forces as well as a Soviet invasion into West Berlin, opening the very real factor that it is now a Third World War. This was Eisenhower's suggestion, out of the belief that there were no active nuclear weapons in Cuba and that the Soviets would not move on West Berlin, which current records show was totally wrong. Nixon would go with that idea. The Eisenhower policy in regards to nuclear exchange was also not nuanced as Kennedy had made it. It was very one size-fits-all full blown exchange. As well as the fact that commanders in the field had discretion in using nuclear weapons, and that there existed a benign ignorance on the part of the Eisenhower administration in regards to the military handling their own affairs and the Joint Chiefs acting as they pleased and planning as they pleased without overt oversight. Kennedy reformed this. I do not see a reason Nixon would. So the JCS plan would be total annihilation of the Soviet Union; not a here, there but not here plan. As Kennedy felt about it, genocide. And that is the plan that is going forward in a Nixon 1962 World War. Why were there missiles installed in Cuba? Because of American nuclear installations in Turkey, Khrushchev's increasingly aggressive posturing, which came partly out of the U2 incident, and Khrushchev's legitimate belief that it would bring the United States to the negotiating table as equals rather than being an affront. The Soviet Union was used to nuclear weapons on their doorstep. The United States was not. In international affairs, you can wah-wah Kennedy as you please. It does not hold water. Khrushchev was the reckless figure. And it is also a problem that the way the Cold War had gone, there was until that time the very real possibility of a quagmire situation of the two powers directly against one another with neither able to back down or trust the other, worsened by many variables, easily able to deteriorate out of control into war at any point. It so happened to occur in Cuba in 1962.
 
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