I am having a difficult time finding this information. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, did Americans know that The U.S. had missiles on the Soviet border long before Russia began building them in Cuba? Based on how people reacted, it feels like many weren't aware and I'm pretty sure the military was notoriously secretive during the Cold War, but I'm not able to find any sources claiming that average citizens knew these things or not.
Thank you!
It's hard to say what the "average American" understood in the 1960s because polling wasn't nearly as frequent an undertaking. Kennedy's job approval, for example, is usually tracked monthly whereas Biden's is measured several times a week.
As for historical polling that parallels Pew's work on news literacy, I'm unaware of enough to draw meaningful inferences, but if someone's got a searchable resource and would care to link it, I'd love to dig through it.
To that end, our best bet is to look at the prominence of stories in the nation's media. After all, media was considerably more monolithic in the 1960s than it is today. Most Americans got their news from a mere handful of TV stations and major newspapers. Chief among the papers was the New York Times - then, as now, the "paper of record" for most of the country.
To that end, we can conclude that many, if not most, Americans were aware of US missiles in Turkey. An Oct 11, 1959 NYT article, which was featured above the fold on the front page, headlines "Turkey to Get IRBM Base; Soviet Complaint Expected; Accord Reached at NATO Headquarters -- U.S. to Supply Weapons -- Washington Ponders Effect on Disarmament"
Other articles follow, though interest in the issue drops off until late 1962 for what are probably obvious reasons.
We can further substantiate the average American's interest in the topic with other media though. Kennedy's 1960 run for the Presidency used the so-called "Missile Gap" as a major foreign policy plank. It even gets a mention in Kennedy's opening statement of his Oct 21st debate with Nixon: "They [the USSR] made a breakthrough in missiles, and by nineteen sixty-one, two, and three, they will be outnumbering us in missiles. I’m not as confident as he is that we will be the strongest military power by 1963."
So I think we can establish that a discussion of relative missile strengths was a big part of the American political zietgiest in 1960 (and consequently at least a memory in '62) and that Americans were aware of US attempts to get IRBMs into bases near the USSR, including those in Turkey which would figure so prominently in the Missile Crisis.
I'm here from the Sunday Digest, and I just wanted to add something. It's certainly true that information about missiles in Turkey was not hidden from the American public, as u/Killfile discusses. However, it's also worth mentioning that, even as the information was, technically, out there, the American narrative constructed around the crisis certainly did not emphasize it. I think it's reasonable to say that, whether or not a given member of the public was aware that American missiles were in Turkey, the information would have played a small role at best in the vast majority of people's understanding and moral appraisal of the situation.
For more on the subject, I argued this view in this comment about the various narratives of the missile crisis in the US, USSR, and Cuba, where I cited the following two articles, which go into the topic in much greater depth, and I would be glad to PM them to you if you don't have access to them otherwise.
Weldes, Jutta. "The Cultural Production of Crises: U.S. Identity and Missiles in Cuba." In Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, edited by Jutta Weldes et al., 35–62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
FitzGerald, Réachbha. "Historians and the Cuban Missile Crisis: the Evidence-Interpretation Relationship as Seen Through Differing Interpretations of the Crisis Settlement." Irish Studies in International Affairs 18 (2007): 191–203.