The 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis were some of the most tense in American history. Plant City resident Ivan Cardwell, who served in the United States Air Force at the time, knows that better than most.
Six years ago, Ivan Cardwell was visiting Boston with a group from First Baptist Church of Plant City when they all took a trip to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. It was supposed to be a half-hour outing and the group would then move on to the next thing in the itinerary. But just as they were about to wrap it up, one last exhibition caught Cardwell’s attention.
The museum was then hosting “To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” It gave museum attendees an in-depth look at the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, primarily from the lens of President John F. Kennedy and his advisors in an effort to illustrate just how close the world came to witnessing nuclear war between the United States and Russia in 1962. Cardwell was immediately and completely captivated.
“I didn’t even know that this was there,” he said. “I was walking around looking at the various exhibits and this was the last one on our way out the door. Everybody on the bus was hollering, ‘Ivan, come on, we’ve got to get out of here!’”
Cardwell did pull away from the exhibit, but not before snapping a photo of a paragraph displayed in the exhibit.
“Pieces of the story that appear hazy now may come into sharper focus over time; others that are now clear will blur as the episode recedes further into history. And perhaps the most intriguing questions of all, which concern the mystery of human behavior, will remain unanswered — known only to the men who looked into the abyss of a nuclear catastrophe, and then stepped back.”
He knew the feeling. He was one of those men.
And for more than 50 years he bore that burden largely by himself, only opening up to a handful of people in his life.
Even then, they only got bits and pieces of the big picture as Cardwell saw it from within the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, shielded underground by tons of granite and three-foot thick steel doors just in case the nuclear weapons were used.
Cardwell, who served with both the United States Air Force and the United States Army, was a staff sergeant with the Air Force at that time and was in the middle of a three-year assignment working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cardwell and his 43-man team split time between Raven Rock and the U.S.S. Northampton CC-1 cruiser ship. His team happened to be on duty at Raven Rock on Oct. 22, 1962, the date of one of the most pivotal moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis: President Kennedy’s television address to the nation, which revealed to the public the evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
“When we came in at noon, everything was relatively normal,” Cardwell said. “Then we came into the cave in the Rock and you could feel there was something different. We didn’t know what it was.”
According to Cardwell, the situation was very grim. His team was briefed and it was there the group learned the two nations were very much on the brink of nuclear war. In fact, they were told to listen to Kennedy’s speech for a top-secret code that would signal the start of a war. At that point they were underground and the thick steel doors were shut behind them in anticipation of the nuclear bombs that, thankfully, never fell on either country.
The team members were permitted to call their families that night as they normally would, but not to reveal any information to them — not that it would have mattered much anyway, as those bombs dropping on American soil meant their families (and a large part of the United States population) would likely have been killed no matter where they would have tried to escape to.
Another paragraph in the JFK Library’s Cuban Missile Crisis exhibition, Cardwell said, helps highlight exactly how close of a call this was. It was a quote from a 1964 interview with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who expressed her desire to stay at the White House with the President and their two children no matter what would happen.
“I said, ‘Please don’t send me to Camp David…if anything happens, we’re all going to stay here with you…even if there’s not room in the bomb shelter in the White House…’ I said, ‘Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens…I just want to be with you and I want to die with you and the children do, too, than live without you.’ So he said he wouldn’t send me away.”
“Every person who signs up in the military knows they’re signing up with the possibility of being killed,” Cardwell said. “When we sign up, we know that’s a real possibility. You’re prepared for it at all times. You don’t know when you’re gonna be thrown into combat or whatever situation. But we never once dreamt that our families would be killed and we would live.”
Cardwell and the others on the team didn’t have time to process that feeling, as they all had urgent jobs to do. And that nightmare scenario never became reality as Kennedy did not give the signal to start a war that night. Kennedy and his administration instead were able to negotiate a deal with Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev to avoid conflict through a mutual compromise.
Cardwell had to compartmentalize that feeling in that moment, and he continued to do so afterward.
His military career was far from over in 1962. After 17 years with the Air Force, he joined the Army in 1969 and retired in 1972 as a Chief warrant officer two with a Bronze Star award for his service during the Vietnam War. Even after retirement, Cardwell’s Cuban Missile Crisis experience and his feelings in that moment were cards he kept close to his chest at all times. There were a handful of family members to whom Cardwell shared some details, but that was just scratching the surface.
“I think the reality of that has built up in him over the years,” Dorinda Cardwell, Ivan’s wife, said. “I wasn’t his wife at the time, but I think that’s what’s happened with him. The reality of that situation has built up within him over the years.”
When he saw that exhibition at the JFK Library, memories of that time and those feelings came rushing back to the front of his mind. He walked away invigorated with a new sense of purpose. He knew he had to start opening up to others.
“It’s important history,” Dorinda said. “These guys aren’t gonna be around much longer, that were involved in it, and it’s just gonna die away. That’s what (Ivan) feels, that he needs to pass this on because there aren’t many of them left. And how many were part of this small team? They’re probably all gone, besides one or two. It’s very important that this gets out.”
For reference, Cardwell was the second-youngest member of his team in 1962. He’s now 85 years old.
He does not want the details of this important moment in history to die with those who lived through it.
With encouragement from family and friends, Cardwell decided to take things a step further than just opening up more to his family. He made it his mission to compile as much publicly available information about the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis as he could.
He spent many months researching and making phone calls until he had enough to put together an exhibition of his own to, in a way, continue the work done by the JFK Library here in Florida. With help from the Plant City Photo Archives and History Center, Cardwell created an exhibition with 10 charts to display for background information. The charts, he said, “tell the whole story” of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his personal experience brings a human element to the presentation.
His first time displaying this exhibition was with his Bible study class at First Baptist Church. Though inexperienced as a presenter, Cardwell captivated his classmates. They encouraged him to take his story to the Photo Archives and he said he spent nearly eight hours interviewing with Anne Cardenas to share his entire story.
COVID-19 foiled other presentation plans around town this year, but Cardwell still wants to get the message out there and is open to telling his story to anyone willing to hear it — especially younger audiences who may have read about the Cuban Missile Crisis but are too many decades removed from it to have a deep understanding of how it felt to live in that moment.
Teaching others is his main goal, but audiences won’t be the only ones who benefit from this. This whole process has been therapeutic for Cardwell. It’s been a way for him to lighten a load he’s carried in private for so long, to get something big off his chest that’s clung to him for longer than many who will read this article or hear him talk have been alive.
“The families didn’t sign up to be killed,” Cardwell said. “We did. But here, it turns out, my family, all the team members’ families and more than half of the United States was gonna be killed. We were gonna live. We didn’t know for how long, but we would live. For 58 years I’ve had to carry that and file it. To get this and talk about it, it helps a lot.”
To learn more about the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, check out the JFK Library’s interactive online exhibit at https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/.
