History 342
Devine
Cuban
Missile Crisis Study Questions
Ex-Comm Transcripts
- During the first two meetings,
what are the major topics of discussion?
What specific topics seem to preoccupy President Kennedy?
- What options do Kennedy’s
advisers offer the President? What
are the pros and cons of each suggestion?
- To what extent do the advisers
seem to have thought through the consequences of each option?
- Why do the advisers have to say
about Soviet motivations for putting missiles in Cuba?
- What is President Kennedy’s
assessment of the situation?
- What impressions do you get from
reading these transcripts over fifty years after the fact? Anything surprising, particularly
revealing, troubling?
- What impression do you get of
Castro just from reading the short excerpt of his letter to Khrushchev?
- What is the tone of the
Khrushchev letters? How does the first differ from the second?
- Why does Khrushchev say the
Soviets sent the missiles to Cuba?
- In the second set of transcripts,
why are the President and his advisers against removing the missiles from
Turkey as a quid pro quo? Why must the two issues be separate?
- What are the various
contingencies Kennedy and his advisers must take into account in dealing
with this crisis – in Europe, in Turkey in Cuba?
