Despite media attention at the time and since, however, stories of frenzied stockpiling and urgent evacuation to underground shelters tell only part of the story. Some of the only public opinion polling conducted at the time reveals that Americans had profoundly ambivalent, at times apathetic, feelings about the emergency. A National Opinion Research Center (NORC) poll conducted between October 27 and November 4, 1962, found that only 36 percent of people said that the week of the crisis was “different from most weeks,” and only about a third of that number said that Cuba was the cause of the difference. The same poll noted that the episode had little psychological impact on the public, either positive or negative.[2] Any careful historian will warn that opinion polls are hardly the final word in reconstructing the past, but such findings should serve as an important counterpoint to easy conclusions that the entire nation spent the crisis in a panic, glued to their televisions and radios.
Even prior to October 1962, many Americans had become disillusioned with the idea of preparing for a nuclear war. Since the creation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in early 1951, the idea of civil defense had gone through the wringer several times over. The FCDA and its descendent organizations consistently struggled to find budgetary support on Capitol Hill. Moreover, federal planning recommendations—first for public bomb shelters, then urban evacuation, then private fallout shelters—had changed several times over the course of the 1950s. To observers, these plans never seemed to keep pace with rapidly-advancing nuclear weapons technology, which became more and more destructive with each passing year. By the early 1960s, civil defense critics charged that these programs were “fostering a cruel deception on the American people” when they claimed that most civilians could survive a nuclear war.[3]
For those Americans who did take measures to prepare for an attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it quickly became apparent that the nation’s decade-plus civil defense pledges were empty promises. Those who contacted civil defense officials were disappointed to hear that public shelters—if they existed at all, and few did—were not stocked with necessary supplies. The crisis in Cuba revealed that some cities had critical vacancies in civil defense command positions, rendering crisis coordination and communication impossible.[4]
But tepid public attitudes toward civil defense came from a more complex, personal place, too. The public’s enthusiasm for civil defense had waxed and waned repeatedly along the contours of the various flashpoints of the early Cold War. I count myself among scholars who can easily identify the public “psychic numbing” that resulted from experiencing nuclear crisis after nuclear crisis.[5] For those of us who have recently experienced the breakneck news cycle of the last several years likely have some personal experience with this phenomenon.