On Dec. 5, 1962, Adlai Stevenson, then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, received a letter from then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy about a story that was to circulate in the Saturday Evening Post. Titled “In Time of Crisis,” the article was an insider account of how Kennedy and his top aides had managed to peacefully resolve the most dangerous international conflict the world had ever faced—the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
The piece depicted Kennedy as a courageous and decisive leader who “never lost his nerve.” By contrast, Stevenson was cast as a Chamberlain-esque appeaser. “Adlai wanted a Munich,” the article quoted one official as saying. The writers, Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, were both Kennedy confidants. They accused Stevenson of being the only presidential advisor who dissented from the consensus among Kennedy aides and “wanted to trade U.S. bases for Cuban bases.” As the article noted derisively, “there seems to be no doubt that he preferred political negotiation to the alternative of military action.”
The story was, to use a currently popular phrase, “fake news”—a mythical account of how the resolution of the missile crisis was achieved, albeit one that served the political purposes of Kennedy and his White House. It helped conceal what, at the time, was the politically inconvenient truth of the missile crisis saga: To avoid nuclear war, Kennedy had secretly adopted Stevenson’s sage advice to pull U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Not only did “In Time of Crisis” unfairly malign Stevenson, whose persistent arguments to prioritize negotiation over the use of force made a major contribution to saving the world, but far worse, the misrepresentations set the stage for a generation of U.S. foreign-policy making based on inaccurate lessons from the missile crisis, arguably contributing to a reliance on force and war over the use of dialogue and negotiation.
Kennedy—who, according to later accounts of the episode, had conferred with the reporters as they wrote their story—stopped short of an apology in his letter to Stevenson. “This is just a note to tell you again how deeply I regret the unfortunate fuss which has arisen over the statements contained in the Saturday Evening Post,” he wrote. “I know you share my confidence that this furor will pass as have all the others.”