JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (14 page)

WASHINGTON

D
uring a meeting on Monday, the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, presented Kennedy with a letter from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev representing the latest installment in the secret correspondence between them that had led to the test ban treaty and an agreement to install a “hotline” between Washington and Moscow that would begin functioning on August 30 and transmit its first operational message on November 22.

They had started exchanging letters after the Cuban missile crisis made them the first men in history forced to make decisions that could lead to the instant death of millions of human beings. Kennedy had initiated the correspondence by writing to Khrushchev on October 28, 1962, a day after the most perilous moment in the crisis, “
I think we should give priority
to questions relating to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, on earth and in outer space, and to the great effort for a nuclear test ban.” When Norman Cousins, who served as an intermediary between them during the spring of 1963, met with Kennedy before leaving for Moscow in April, Kennedy predicted that Khrushchev would say that he wanted to reduce tensions but could see no reciprocal interest in Washington. “
It is important that he be corrected
on this score,” he said. “I’m not sure Khrushchev knows this, but I don’t think there’s any man in American politics who’s more eager than I am to put Cold War animosities behind us and get down to the hard business of building friendly relations.”

Cousins would make several observations about Khrushchev that also applied to Kennedy, among them his description of the Soviet leader as “
a lonesome figure
who gave the impression of being gregarious,” and a man who “never attempted to conceal his peasant background” yet “didn’t hesitate to wear expensive silk shirts and gold cufflinks.” Their correspondence also shows them sharing concerns about the health risks of nuclear fallout and proliferation, and understanding that the other faced similar pressures from hard-liners within his own government and military. Kennedy referred to this in his April 11, 1963, letter to Khrushchev, writing, “
In closing, I want again to send my warm personal wishes
to you and your family. These are difficult and dangerous times in which we live, and both you and I have grave responsibilities to our families and to all of mankind. The pressures from those who have a less patient and peaceful outlook are very great—but I assure you of my own determination to work to strengthen world peace.” Two weeks later, Kennedy told Cousins, who was briefing him on his conversations with Khrushchev, “
One of the ironic things
about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. Meanwhile the lack of progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and in the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.”

Kennedy had witnessed this when Khrushchev sent him two contradictory communications on successive days during the Cuban crisis. The first was a conciliatory letter, the second a brusque ultimatum. The former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson advised him that Khrushchev might have sent the second message to placate hard-liners and recommended ignoring it and responding to the first message.

The crisis afforded Khrushchev a similar understanding of the pressures on Kennedy. He wrote in his 1970 memoirs that during a secret meeting between Robert Kennedy and Ambassador Dobrynin, Robert Kennedy had said, “
The President is in a grave situation
, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba.” Considering this, he said, the president “implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer.” He also warned that although the president was “very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”

The American editor of Khrushchev’s memoirs wrote in a footnote, “
Obviously, this is Khrushchev’s own version
of what was reported to him. There is no evidence that the President was acting out of fear of a military take-over.”
Dobrynin gave an account of his conversation
with Robert Kennedy in his memoirs that was based on a report he had written in 1962 that supported Khrushchev’s version. He wrote that during his pivotal late-night meeting with Robert Kennedy on Saturday, October 27, the president’s brother “remarked almost in passing that a lot of unreasonable people among American generals—and not only generals—were ‘spoiling for a fight.’”

It is possible that Bobby told Dobrynin that his brother feared a military coup, hoping to frighten the Soviets into removing their missiles from Cuba. But what
is
certain is that by the fall of 1962 the president not only believed a coup was possible, but had repeatedly discussed its likelihood. That fall, Harper and Row published
Seven Days in May,
a thriller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles V. Bailey II about a coup against a U.S. president instigated by his decision to sign a controversial nuclear arms pact with the Soviet Union.
Knebel got the idea
from an interview with Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay shortly after the Bay of Pigs. LeMay was still furious with Kennedy for refusing to provide air support for the Cuban rebels, and after going off the record he accused him of cowardice.
Knebel also found inspiration
in a 1962 conversation with Secretary of the Navy John Connally. With LeMay’s remarks fresh in his mind, Knebel had turned the conversation to the military’s unhappiness with the president. Connally acknowledged that some of his admirals disliked taking orders from the New Frontiersman, and felt they could not express themselves politically. Later in the conversation, Connally mused that the atomic bomb had created conditions in which “the U.S. might unwittingly be laying the groundwork for a military dictatorship.”

On March 13, 1962, six months before the publication of Knebel’s book, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sent Secretary of Defense McNamara
a top-secret memorandum proposing Operation Northwoods
, a program of clandestine actions designed to provide what the chiefs called “adequate justification” for the United States to invade Cuba. It resembled the incursions by German troops dressed in Polish uniforms that Hitler used as a pretext for invading Poland. The chiefs recommended a “logical build-up of incidents” that would “camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility of a large scale,” and “place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba.” To accomplish this, they suggested “well-coordinated incidents” at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in the airspace over Cuba, and on the U.S. mainland. At Guantánamo, anti-Castro Cubans dressed in Cuban Army uniforms would be “captured” by U.S. forces after pretending to attack the base. “Blow up ammunition inside the base,” the Northwoods memorandum recommended. “Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage). . . . Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. . . . Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock victims.” The chiefs also proposed what they called a “Remember the
Maine
” incident that involved blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay or destroying an unmanned drone vessel in waters off Havana, and blaming Castro. “The U.S. could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation . . . to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew,” they suggested. “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” The memorandum’s most disturbing paragraph began, “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which might entail “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots.” It continued, “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”

After receiving a summary
of the memorandum, Kennedy told Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer that he could not imagine a set of events “that would justify and make desirable the use of American Forces for overt military action” against Castro’s Cuba. Three months later, he transferred him to Europe to serve as supreme allied commander of NATO, replacing him with Maxwell Taylor. Kennedy was too smart, and too suspicious of the brass, not to recall Operation Northwoods when he read
Seven Days in May
in galleys a few months later, and not to reason that if the chiefs were prepared to recommend deceptive, violent, and illegal actions on the U.S. mainland that risked harming civilians, it was not preposterous to imagine them cooking up a similar scheme to justify overthrowing a president whose policies they viewed as threatening national security.
After finishing the book
, he told Laura Bergquist that he had been pondering the possibility of a military coup, and then named some generals at the Pentagon whom he thought “might hanker to duplicate fiction.”

During a discussion
of
Seven Days in May,
Fay asked Kennedy if he really believed a coup was possible. He said it was, and believed it would require three confrontations between a president and the military similar to the one between himself and the Joint Chiefs during the Bay of Pigs. “The conditions would have to be just right,” he said. “If the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be certain uneasiness, and maybe the military would criticize him behind his back [as LeMay had done during the Knebel interview] but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there was another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced.’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”

This second Bay of Pigs scenario bore a resemblance to how some of the chiefs would react several months after his conversation with Fay, when he rejected their recommendation to bomb Soviet missile sites in Cuba and instead imposed a naval blockade. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room during the crisis, LeMay told him, “
I just don’t see
any other solution except military intervention
right now
,” and condemned a blockade as “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” A few minutes later, LeMay said bluntly, “I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

“What did you say?” Kennedy asked, forcing LeMay to repeat himself.

“You’re in a pretty bad fix.”

“You’re in there with me.” After a pause, he added, “Personally.”

“
Can you imagine LeMay saying
a thing like that?” he asked O’Donnell afterward. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

LeMay’s comment bordered on insubordination and may have contributed to Bobby’s remark to Dobrynin that “
the President is not sure that
the military will not overthrow him and seize power.” LeMay would call the peaceful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis “
the greatest defeat in our history
.” If he really believed that, why not consider extralegal means to remove the man responsible?

After the crisis ended, Kennedy told Schlesinger, “
The military are mad
. They wanted to do this [invade Cuba]. It’s lucky for us that we have Mac [Robert McNamara] over there.” He told Bradlee, “
The first advice I’m going to give
my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
A year later McNamara informed
Kennedy that according to Admiral Hyman Rickover, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson had been “absolutely insubordinate” during the missile crisis and had “consciously acted contrary to the President’s instructions.” Kennedy asked what Rickover had meant by this. McNamara answered, “Rickover said enough to let me know that Anderson was objecting to the instructions that you and I were giving relating to the quarantine and the limiting of action in relation to stopping the Russian ships.” Kennedy asked if this meant Anderson wanted to sink a ship. “That’s right,” McNamara said.

The actor Kirk Douglas was serving himself in a buffet dinner line in the White House in January 1963 when Kennedy came up behind him and asked, “
Do you intend to make a movie
out of
Seven Days in May
?” Douglas confirmed that he was producing and starring in a film version of the book being directed by John Frankenheimer. Kennedy said, “Good!” and as their meals cooled spent twenty minutes explaining why Knebel’s book would make a great movie.

Pierre Salinger told Frankenheimer that the president wanted the film made “
as a warning to the Republic
.” Schlesinger thought he hoped it would “raise the consciousness about the problems involved if the generals got out of control,” and might also serve “
as a warning to the generals
.” After the Defense Department denied Frankenheimer permission to film at the Pentagon, Kennedy took a long weekend in Hyannis Port so the director could shoot crowd scenes outside the White House.