Concluding Remarks

Thant’s Prestige Grows.
— Headline in the New York Times, November 4, 1962.

The story of the Cuban missile crisis, including the multifarious activities of the secretary general and ExComm reactions to his initiatives, shows that Thant had a significant impact on both parties. He influenced their thinking, negotiating positions, stance towards the use of force, and proclivity to accept a proposal, including the noninvasion deal that he pressed for both publicly and privately.

When Thant took his first bold initiative in this crisis, it was at the bequest of the smaller, newer, and neutral members of the United Nations, organized in making their appeal to him by the representative of Cyprus, a small and troubled country. Ironically, both the United States and the USSR initially resisted Thant’s first appeal. Soviet Ambassador Zorin condemned it, but Khrushchev then embraced it. U.S. Ambassador Stevenson was disappointed about its content, while British Prime Minister Macmillan condemned it as “a very dangerous message.” Nobody foresaw that it would help effect a Soviet retreat on the high seas. And when some Soviet ships turned back, Kennedy seized upon Thant as an intermediary by asking him to send another message to Khrushchev to help the Soviet leader save face in ordering back the rest of his ships—as Kennedy described it to Ball, so Khrushchev does not have to “crawl down.”

In the aftermath of this crisis, many attributed Kennedy’s success to his resolve and strength. We can see that of equal importance was his rare recognition of the need to provide his opponent with an honorable alternative and of the utility of a skilled intermediary in presenting one. The explicit instructions handed to Thant by Stevenson on October 25 detailed exactly what the Americans wanted Thant to send to Khrushchev as his own proposal, or specifically how they wanted Thant to play a classic third-party role. This act, initiated by Kennedy, transformed the crisis by making Thant its mediator.

An interesting lesson that emerges from this conflict is how a mediator’s offer to assist may be initially rejected by one or both of the parties but then embraced. The Cuban missile crisis clearly indicates that initial rejections of the mediator should not be construed as final, for they can indeed be reversed when calmer minds prevail. In fact, the mediator’s actions can even be greatly appreciated later.

Another lesson is the mediator’s ability to elicit concessions from the parties in such a manner that they do not appear as submission or capitulation. The enormous significance of Thant’s messages echoes in Stevenson’s words that “the Secretary General’s intervention led to the diversion of the Soviet ships headed for Cuba and interception by our Navy. This was the indispensable first step in the peaceful resolution of the Cuban crisis.”¹⁴⁷

From the moment of his second appeal, Thant continued to moderate the parties’ behavior. Kennedy’s own words at ExComm indicate that he exercised restraint because he chose to wait for Khrushchev’s response to Thant’s second appeal rather than take military action. This restraint continued afterwards when, on numerous occasions, Kennedy decided not to escalate the conflict because he retained hope in Thant’s efforts. Frequent reference to Thant during the ExComm discussions, especially by Kennedy and Secretary Rusk, indicate the extent to which Thant’s efforts dissuaded the United States from escalating the conflict. For example, the United States did not add POL to the quarantined items or use flares for night surveillance because of hopes, especially voiced by Rusk, that Thant’s efforts might secure Soviet cooperation.

In tight situations the United States turned to Thant for help. When the Grozny was approaching the demarcation line, Kennedy, rather than ordering the boarding of this ship, instead asked Thant to convey the exact location of the demarcation line to the Soviets. When Kennedy received Khrushchev’s new demand for the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey, his immediate response was to ask Thant to get assurances from the Soviets that work on the missile sites in Cuba had ceased.

Thant single-mindedly advanced the noninvasion proposal that became the centerpiece of the final settlement. Possibly he did this at Khrushshev’s request, which would indicate that Khrushchev used Thant as a means to indirectly introduce an initiative, as did Kennedy. In any case, the leaders both recognized that agreeing to a proposal from a mediator would be more acceptable than backing down to an opponent. Whatever the Soviet role may have been in the Thant proposal, the secretary general certainly gave the noninvasion pledge salience in the negotiating process. He did so by publicly proposing it early (in the October 24 Security Council meeting), then by expressing his confidence to Stevenson that it would be acceptable to the Soviets as a trade for the Cuban missiles, and then by personally telephoning Secretary Rusk, an exceptional move, to press for the proposal.

Figure 7: President John F. Kennedy bids farewell to U Thant after visiting UN Headquarters on September 20, 1963, almost a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. To the right of Thant is US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson (UN Photo/YN).

The significance of all this lies in the fact that when Thant presented the “noninvasion for missiles” trade, the Americans were still pressing for prolonged negotiations of several weeks preceded by a freeze of Cuban missile activity. The Americans simply could not foresee a much faster way out of the crisis than arduous negotiations with the missiles frozen in place. The Thant formula saw the missile sites dismantled in mere days, and Thant was on hand in Cuba to get first-hand reports of the progress.

As early as October 26, when pressure was mounting because the Americans believed the missile sites were approaching operational readiness, Rusk, Kennedy, and even the British prime minister were thinking of the possibility of Thant leading a mission to Cuba well before Castro invited him. They had come to appreciate the mediator’s enormous utility, and their strategy involved him extensively.

Mediated conflicts are of many types and involve varying degrees of mediator activity. In some cases the mediator may even control the proposals and communications between the protagonists, as Kissinger did in his “shuttle diplomacy” and Jimmy Carter did at Camp David. But a mediator may also play a less formalized role that does not control all communications but that nevertheless effects significant change in the negotiations. This is Thant’s case. Without dominating the process he performed numerous functions, some spontaneously and some at the request of the parties. He facilitated face-saving and de-escalation, transmitted messages, fostered confidence, made proposals, and affected the negotiations profoundly.

President Kennedy later said, “U Thant has put the world deeply in his debt”¹⁴⁸ (Figure 7). Many New York Times headlines and articles lauded the secretary general’s role. When Pravda first began to signal on October 26 the Soviet readiness to make a deal, it quoted the full text of Thant’s letter to Khrushchev on the front page along with Khrushchev’s reply.¹⁴⁹

Certainly military power and a resolve to use it played a role in this conflict. But so did the influence of a highly respected mediator who assisted the parties in pulling back from the brink. The faith of the parties in U Thant is evident in their discussions, their requests to him, and his many successful initiatives. To view the Cuban missile crisis simply as a victory of U.S. military might is a false and incomplete interpretation of the conflict. This is not only because of the significant effect that Thant had upon the protagonists, but also because Kennedy gave his opponent an honorable way out, and skillfully used a mediator to do so despite advice to the contrary. His victory lay in exercising restraint, even to the point of refusing to give orders to fire upon Soviet antiaircraft installations that had shot down an American plane and in making concessions based in part on the mediator’s suggestions. These qualities led to his, and perhaps America’s, “finest hour.”

Certainly for Thant and his UN organization, the Cuban missile crisis was their “finest hour.” One of the great ironies is that at the outset of this crisis, many officials condemned Thant’s first message and tried to prevent him from mediating the conflict. But, as Virgil wrote, “Heaven thought otherwise.”