“We had the view that Kennedy was ‘the Harvard guy next door,’” Stevenson said.
Graham T. Allison ’62, a government professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, agreed that Kennedy “wisely resisted pressure to react quickly with a surprise air strike” and, by working out an agreement with the Soviets, “avoided escalating the crisis to nuclear war.”
Some students at the time were more critical of Kennedy’s response to the crisis, however, many of whom were members of Tocsin.
Three days before the end of the crisis, Tocsin organized a rally to criticize U.S. policy toward Cuba in Lowell Lecture Hall that drew more than 2000 students, more than half of whom were turned away due to the lecture hall’s limited capacity. According to a Crimson article published the following day, the 900 eventual attendees listened on and cheered as professors like Tocsin’s faculty advisor H. Stuart Hughes denounced the Kennedy’s military actions, and the students almost unanimously passed a resolution against an American invasion of Cuba.
AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON
On October 28, 1962, Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached a deal that would have Soviet missiles in Cuba brought back to the Soviet Union in exchange for a public vow by the U.S. to not invade Cuba, thus bringing the 13-day crisis to an end.
“Khrushchev capitulates—amazing but wonderful,” wrote Stevenson in his journal.
That day, several leaders of Tocsin were in Washington, where they had been picketing to rally opposition against the blockade of Cuba.
“When announcement of stand-down came, we drank a bunch,” said Gitlin.
Fifty years later, students reflect that they did not fully realize the weight of the situation at the time.
“We didn’t know how close the world had been to nuclear war,” Gitlin said.
He noted that only in the aftermath of what is now referred to as the “Cuban Missile Crisis” did historians understand the extent of the risk that the world would dissolve into a state of nuclear warfare.
“The Russians were within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear attack on a American aircraft carrier—this is now known to historians,” Gitlin said. “And the United States was very close to invading Cuba which would have precipitated a war response. So from several directions the world was really on the brink of nuclear war.”
Freed also realized that the risks of full-blown nuclear warfare were “much higher” than he perceived during his time at Harvard after he read articles on the topic years later.
“It was very sobering to me how I was so lucky [to survive],” he said, adding that he thinks that the legacy of the crisis is more significant than the dangers of the event itself. “It really marked a new world epic.”
—Staff writer Melody Y. Guan can be reached at yguan@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @MelodyGuan.