Uses of History In International Affairs: The Cuban Missile Crisis & The Swine Flu Scare

By: Catherine Reynolds, United States, International Affairs MA at The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs.

Used within an appropriate context, history is the modern policy maker’s most valuable asset.

A roadmap that begins in the past and reaches into the future, history provides an evolving commentary on when to act, where and why. When faced with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of historically-informed decision making based on state-level patterns of organizational behavior proved a resource for success. At the least, managing to avert the advent of nuclear war. When applied out of context, however, history is a poor advisor as Truman learned when treating the 1918 Influenza epidemic as analogous to the advent of the 1976 Swine Flu.

Kennedy’s understanding of the present through the lens of the past proved key to alleviating U.S./Russia tensions over nuclear missiles in Cuba. Assembling ExComm which included Charles Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson and Edwin Martine, Kennedy created a portfolio of perspectives whose expertise included the Soviet Union, insight into Russia’s World War Two, and Cuba. Expressing an “uncommon interest in the history in the heads of their adversaries”¹, ExComm applied contextualized timelines to Russian decision makers in order to understand their patterns of organizational behavior to best diffuse the missile-related tension. While Kennedy initially equated his position to that of Tojo when considering the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, further inspection into the likenesses and differences of the analogy deemed it “thoroughly false pajortivie”². Subsequent decisions regarding a symbolically parallel airstrike were discarded. Focusing on which perceived realities of Russian presence in Cuba were actually known as opposed to presumed granted essential clarification of the situation, advising the best placement of force or inter-party communication. These factors, in addition to Thompson’s historically based assumption that the Russian government “likes parallels”³, facilitated an agreement. The Russians pulled out of Cuba, and five months later the U.S. Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey.

Truman’s use of history in the Swine Flu scare of 1976 is an example of when, applied out of context, history can point professional decision makers toward disaster. In the wake of the 1918 Influenza pandemic, the Truman administration recalled the government’s failures to contain the outbreak. Shying from a repeated stain on the presidential national narrative, Truman sought the advice of the CDC, NAIAD, and FDA. The organizations included older specialists for whom images of 1918 were vividly remembered. When their prediction that the Swine Flu would resurface the following year on an annual cycle proved false, long-standing preconceptions were uprooted. When media sources incorrectly linked civilian deaths to the vaccine, members of poorer demographics lost trust in the vaccine remembering “a long history of medical racism”⁴. The Truman administration quickly replaced scientists with “mostly managerial, media-related, or political, not medical”⁵ professionals. They did not pause to consider to what degree the viruses were antigenically related. In “ten weeks more than 40 million persons had received flu shots”⁶, despite a single case of the Swine Flu reported in all of 1977. Applying historically substantiated solutions to the wrong context, Truman’s response to the Swine Flu was one of the worst applications of history in American policy making.

A volatile oracle, history would have served Truman better had he stopped to consider what was known, unclear and presumed when likening the Swine Flu of 1976 to the 1918 Influenza epidemic. Kennedy’s clarification of the likenesses and differences between the Cuban Missile Crisis and Pearl Harbor likely saved him from plunging the Earth into a nuclear winter. With presidential decision makers for whom “history and statecraft go together”⁷, success (and often re-election) relies on rewriting nationalist histories through re-packaged defeat, manipulation of public attrition, and self-substantiating historical milestones. For these decision makers and their advisors, history should not be overlooked as their most valuable ally.

Endnote Bibliography:

1. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press, 1988, 11.
2. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press, 1988, 7.
3. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press, 1988, 12.
4. Norris, Michele L. “Opinion | Black People Are Justifiably Wary of a Vaccine. Their Trust Must Be Earned.” The Washington Post. WP Company, December 10, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/black-people-are-justifiably-wary-of-a-vaccine-their-trust-must-be-earned/2020/12/09/4cf5f18c-3a36-11eb-9276-ae0ca72729be_story.html, 1.
5. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press, 1988, 55.
6. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press, 1988, 52.
7. Brands, Hal, and William Inboden. “Wisdom without Tears: Statecraft and the Uses of History.” Journal of Strategic Studies 41, no. 7 (2018): 916–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2018.1428797, 1.