During 75 minutes of tense deliberations in the Head's Boardroom, the Spring ExComm avoided nuclear war by implementing a quarantine around Cuba to stop the import of nuclear missiles and quietly negotiating with the Soviets for the removal of American missiles in Turkey.
President John F. Kennedy (Aaron Nesmith) led a focused discussion, often asking his committee members pointed questions and asking them to debate each other on the merits of their positions in real time. The National Security Advisor McGeroge Bundy (Manning Snyder and Peter Zervos) gave a detailed overview of the situation, raising not only the immediate issues regarding missiles in Cuba, but the larger geopolitical considerations. Secretary of State Dean Rusk (Carolyn Zervos and Jonathan Laureano) continued to remind the president and all ExComm members of the implications of US action in the larger Latin American context as well as sensitivities about Soviet intentions around Berlin.
A more militaristic tack was offered quietly by firmly by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor (Michael Martin and Kent Lawrence). The president soon took those actions of the table. CIA Director John McCone (Sam McLean and Olivia Holmes) argued in cool and collected tones that they saw ways to not only get the missiles out, but to eliminate the larger ideological communist threat in Cuba through covert means. Fears of the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and political concerns raised forcefully by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy (Emily Symonds) helped turn the president's attention to a blockade or, as the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Alex Des Francs and Andre Hebra) termed it, a quarantine. Treasury Secretary Douglass Dillon (Waleed Hardy and James Newlands) dapperly discussed the relative costs of a quarantine vs. a more militaristic intervention.
Posted by Dr. Tom Westerman, History faculty