Thomas G. Paterson

October Missiles and November Elections: The Cuban Missile Crisis and American Politics, 1962

I told you that the President would move on Cuba before [the] election, Sen. Norris Cotton of New Hampshire reminded his constituents a week after President John F. Kennedy had dramatically announced that the United States was imposing a quarantine against Cuba to force Soviet missiles from the Caribbean island. Another Republican standing for reelection in 1962, Rep. Thomas B. Curtis of Missouri, told voters in his district that the Cuban missile crisis was phony and contrived for election purposes. Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, like many others, suspected that the Kennedy administration had played politics with foreign policy to help Democrats in the congressional elections of November 6.1 The claim and fear that presidents play politics with foreign policy, especially in electoral seasons, is familiar and often well founded. Throughout American history, suspicions have flourished that presidents take unusual and sometimes extreme diplomatic or military steps, utter hyperboles, practice deceit, or manufacture foreign crises to improve their own and their partys chances at the polls. Like political leaders before him, Kennedy had invited imputations that he exploited foreignpolicy issues for political gain or that he made diplomatic decisions in response to domestic political pressure. Indeed, about a month before the missile crisis, Kennedy had made a conspicuous political decision in foreign affairs: to sell Hawk missiles to Israel. American Jews had lobbied intensely for the sale; some of them had even withheld contributions from congressional candidates until they saw Kennedy act on the deal. The sale of those short-range missiles, the administration

The Abortive American Loan to Russia and the Origins of the Cold War, 1943-1946

THE American ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, cabled the Department of State in January 1945 that the Soviet Union placed high importance on a large postwar credit as a basis for the development of Soviet-American relations. From his (V. M. Molotovsl statement I sensed an implication that the development of our friendly relations would depend upon a generous credit. In October 1945, a diplomat at the Foreign Ministers Council meeting in London noted the issues which he thought were impeding amicable Russian-American relations-the atomic bomb and an American loan to Russia.2 A few years later, an associate of Donald M. Nelson, War Production Board chairman, wrote: Although little publicized, the possibility of this loan for a time almost certainly influenced Soviet policy toward the United States, and its refusal coincided significantly with the increasing aggressiveness of the Kremlin.3 In the 1943-1945 period, a postwar American loan to the Soviet Union might have served as peacemaker; but by the early part of 1946 both nations had become increasingly uncompromising on the major international issues, and the usefulness of a loan to the United States, to Russia, and to amicable and productive relations had been called into serious doubt. Whether such a loan, Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., later wrote, would have made the Soviet Union a more reasonable and cooperative nation in the postwar world will be one of the great if questions of history.4 The recent availability of historical sources provides material for a suggestive answer to Stettinius question.5 The evidence suggests that