The US Ambassador to Moscow who knew Khrushchev personally and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, told Kennedy to ignore the second letter
"The important thing for Khrushchev, it seems to me, is to be able to say 'I saved Cuba; I stopped an invasion,'" Thompson told the ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
An American diplomat who served as Ambassador to Moscow from 1957 to 1962, building a personal rapport with Nikita Khrushchev that gave Washington rare insight into Soviet decision-making. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, on Kennedy's ExComm, he was the one who argued that the second, more aggressive Khrushchev letter of October 27 should be ignored and the first, conciliatory letter of October 26 answered instead: the strategy that became the resolution. He returned to Moscow as ambassador under Johnson and helped shape nuclear non-proliferation policy and the SALT process.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1928Entered the U.S. Foreign Service
- 1941Second Secretary, U.S. Embassy Moscow; remained after German invasion
- 1952–1957High Commissioner and Ambassador to Austria; Austrian State Treaty and Trieste settlement
- 1957–1962Ambassador to USSR; Camp David and Vienna summits, U-2 incident, Kitchen Debate
- 1962ExComm member; key role in Cuban Missile Crisis resolution
- 1962–1966Ambassador-at-Large for Soviet Affairs and Deputy Under-Secretary for Political Affairs
- 1967–1969Ambassador to USSR; Glassboro Summit, SALT and non-proliferation policy
Related historical events
The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Choice of October 27
On October 27, 1962, the Kennedy administration’s Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) debated which of Khrushchev’s two letters to answer. The October 26 letter linked a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba with the Soviet withdrawal of its missiles; the letter made public on October 27 additionally demanded the removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. As pressure mounted for an air strike and invasion, Thompson proposed rejecting the second letter’s demand and replying to the first. Drawing on his personal acquaintance with Khrushchev, he judged that the Soviet leader needed a way to retreat to his first proposal without appearing to back down from a public, harder line. Kennedy followed Thompson’s advice. That evening Robert Kennedy delivered the president’s letter to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and separately conveyed, in private, that the United States planned to withdraw its Turkish missiles after the crisis. The status of the missile question later became controversial. The public U.S. account denied an explicit exchange commitment, while later examination of documents and memoirs supported the existence of a secret understanding. The Soviet Union withdrew its missiles from Cuba, and the United States pledged not to invade Cuba. The crisis ended without a military attack, and withdrawal of the Turkish missiles followed in secret.