Saturday, October 27, 1962, came to be known as the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. American leaders were trying to stop the Soviet Union from completing nuclear missile installations in Cuba. Then a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the island. Its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., was killed.
The destruction of the U-2 placed President John F. Kennedy under enormous pressure to strike back. American military commanders had already been preparing for possible air attacks and invasion. Kennedy and his advisers were also trying to interpret conflicting messages from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: one letter suggested a settlement based on a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba, while a later public demand raised American missiles in Turkey.
At the same time, American warships enforcing the naval quarantine were confronting Soviet vessels and submarines. The day brought several opportunities for decisions made by exhausted crews, officials and commanders to turn a standoff into a war. The danger was not only a deliberate order from the White House or Kremlin; events in the field were moving faster than diplomatic messages.
Kennedy's advisers chose to answer the earlier, more conciliatory Soviet letter and continue private negotiations. The following day Khrushchev publicly agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba, while the United States pledged not to invade the island; a separate, confidential understanding concerned U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The crisis had not ended when October 27 began, and there was no guarantee it would end peacefully.
This photo album brings together Major Anderson's portrait, a U-2 aircraft, reconnaissance evidence, authentic U.S. defense imagery from October 27 and the day's National Security Council records. Two later photographs are included to show how the decision-makers and naval standoff appeared in the immediate aftermath. The captions mark the later dates explicitly. The chronology is corroborated by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the National Security Archive, and U.S. Air Force history.
Topic: Cuban Missile Crisis; Black Saturday; Rudolf Anderson; John F. Kennedy; Nikita Khrushchev
