An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (95 page)

But Kennedy did not have to wait two days. Within two hours after talking to Macmillan, he received a long, rambling letter from Khrushchev, which Llewellyn Thompson, who was with the president when he read it, believed Khrushchev had written in a state of near panic without consultation. It was an unmistakable plea for a settlement. He justified Soviet help to Cuba as preserving its right of self-determination against U.S. aggression, and he continued to dispute Kennedy’s characterization of the missiles as offensive weapons, but declared, “Let us not quarrel now. It is apparent that I will not be able to convince you of this.” He had no interest in mutual destruction. It was time for “good sense.” To that end, he proposed an exchange: If the United States promised not to invade or support an invasion of Cuba and would recall its fleet, the Soviet Union would no longer see a need for armaments on the island—“the presence of our military specialists in Cuba would disappear.” He urged Kennedy to avoid the catastrophe of a nuclear war, but warned, should there be one, “We are ready for this.”

Because he could not bring himself to say directly that he would remove the missiles from Cuba—to acknowledge his defeat and humiliation—Khrushchev spoke more clearly through a subordinate. On the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, Aleksandr Feklisov, who was officially known as Aleksandr Fomin, the KGB station chief in Washington, ostensibly a Soviet embassy counsel, asked John Scali, an ABC television journalist, to meet him. Scali, who had had occasional meetings with Fomin for ten months, suggested lunch at the Occidental restaurant in downtown Washington. Fomin made a startling proposal. Scali should transmit to the State Department a three-point proposal for ending the Cuban crisis. In return for a promise not to invade Cuba, Moscow would dismantle its missile bases on the island, and Castro would pledge never to accept offensive weapons of any kind.

But fresh evidence of Soviet progress on the missile sites, coupled with reports that six Soviet and three satellite ships remained on course toward the quarantine line, put a damper on Khrushchev’s negotiating proposal. “We cannot permit ourselves to be impaled on a long negotiating hook while the work goes on on these bases,” Kennedy told the Ex Comm at the October 27 morning meeting. They feared that Khrushchev’s letter might be a ploy for engaging them in drawn-out talks that would allow Soviet completion of the missile sites.

A new initiative from Moscow, which reached Kennedy during the morning Ex Comm discussions, deepened their suspicions. The Kremlin had released a more polished version of Khrushchev’s October 26 letter to the press. It now included a proposal that the United States remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in return for the dismantling of what “you regard as offensive weapons” in Cuba. The revised letter also maintained the demand for a pledge against invading Cuba and reliance on the U.N. as an intermediary.

The altered proposal created consternation among the Ex Comm members. It impressed them as the work of the Politburo eager to gain more advantages than Khrushchev had originally demanded. Could they, then, simply ignore the addition of Turkey to the exchange of pledges and respond only to Khrushchev’s first proposal? “Well now, that’s just what we ought to be thinking about,” Kennedy said. But it would put the United States “in an unsupportable position” because “to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it [the Turkey-Cuba swap] will look like a very fair trade.” Bundy disagreed, arguing that such a trade-off would not sit well with our European allies, who would see us as “trying to sell our allies for our interests.” To buy time, the group released an interim press statement. “Several inconsistent and conflicting proposals have been made by the U.S.S.R. within the last 24 hours,” the White House announcement said. “The proposal broadcast this morning involves the security of nations outside the Western Hemisphere. But it is the Western Hemisphere countries and they alone that are subject to the threat that has produced the current crisis.” Only after this threat had ended would the United States take up proposals concerning the security of nations elsewhere.

For almost four hours beginning at 4:00
P.M.
on Saturday the twenty-seventh, the Ex Comm agonized over Khrushchev’s Cuba-for-Turkey missile swap. With the Cuban missile sites nearing completion and reports that a SAM had shot down a U-2 flying over Cuba and killed its pilot, the Joint Chiefs were pressing for a massive air strike no later than Monday morning, the twenty-ninth, to be followed by an invasion in seven days. Kennedy and his advisers saw Khrushchev’s proposal as possibly the last chance to reach a settlement and avoid military action that could lead to a nuclear exchange.

Everyone agreed that trading the Jupiters in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba would undermine the NATO alliance and weaken faith in U.S. willingness to take risks for the defense of its allies. Llewellyn Thompson also believed that it was unnecessary to include the Turkish missiles in the deal; Khrushchev would be able to boast of saving Cuba from a U.S. invasion, and he did not need to remove the Jupiters to end the crisis.

But Kennedy was not so sure. He was eager to do everything possible to avoid military action and the “ultimate failure,” a nuclear war. He wanted to promise to discuss the Jupiters in Turkey if Khrushchev would suspend work on the missile sites and “disarm these weapons.” If we keep the missiles in Turkey, Kennedy believed, “we are either going to have to invade or have a massive strike on Cuba which may lose Berlin. That’s what concerns me,” he said. He thought that once the bloodletting began, the NATO countries would look back and say the Turkish deal “was a pretty good proposition.”

Nevertheless, Kennedy’s advisers convinced him to omit any mention of Turkey in his written reply to Khrushchev—in other words, to answer the first letter and largely ignore the second. He told Khrushchev that he first had to stop work on offensive missile bases in Cuba, make all offensive weapons systems there “inoperable,” and halt the further introduction of such weapons. All of it was to be done under U.N. supervision. In return, the United States would end the quarantine and give assurances against an invasion of Cuba. Such a settlement “would enable us to work toward a more general arrangement regarding ‘other armaments,’ as proposed in your second letter which you made public. . . . The continuation of this threat, or a prolonging of this discussion concerning Cuba by linking these problems to the broader questions of European and world security, would surely lead to an intensification of the Cuban crisis and a grave risk to the peace of the world.”

At the same time Kennedy cabled his letter to Moscow, he had Bobby hand deliver it to Dobrynin. By using his brother as the messenger, Kennedy was indicating that this was no committee or bureaucratic response but a statement of his personal eagerness to end the crisis on the terms described in the letter. Bobby’s mission was also meant to signal the urgency of a positive response from Khrushchev to relieve Pentagon pressure on the president for military action. As is clear from a memo Bobby subsequently made of his conversation with Dobrynin, he left no question that a failure to agree to the proposed exchange would have disastrous consequences. Bobby told him that the attack on the U-2 and death of the pilot compelled the administration “to make certain decisions within the next 12 or possibly 24 hours. There was very little time left. If the Cubans were shooting at our planes, then we were going to shoot back.” Bobby told Dobrynin “that he had better understand the situation and he had better communicate that understanding to Mr. Khrushchev. . . . We had to have a commitment by at least tomorrow that those bases would be removed. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those bases then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans there would also be dead Russians.” Bobby warned that “drastic consequences” would come from a failure to accept the president’s proposal by the next day.

When Dobrynin asked about Khrushchev’s proposal on Turkey, Bobby was ready with an answer. At a meeting with the president and several of his advisers just before he met with the ambassador, Bobby was instructed by Kennedy and Rusk to say that “while there could be no deal over the Turkish missiles, the President was determined to get them out and would do so once the Cuban crisis was resolved.” The group agreed that knowledge of this commitment would be a closely guarded secret, since “this unilateral private assurance might appear to betray an ally.” Bobby was also told to make plain to Dobrynin that if Moscow revealed this pledge, it would become null and void. On October 27, Kennedy secretly instructed Rusk to telephone Andrew Cordier, a Columbia University dean, who had served under U Thant at the U.N., and ask him to be prepared to give the secretary general a statement proposing the simultaneous removal of the missiles in Turkey and Cuba. Although this contingency plan was never activated and Rusk did not reveal its existence until 1987, it leaves no doubt that the president would have publicly given up the Jupiters for an end to the crisis.

No one involved in the October 27 discussions could have doubted that the United States was on the brink of military action against Cuba, which seemed likely to lead to a crisis in Europe and a possible war with the Soviet Union. Kenny O’Donnell remembered an Ex Comm evening meeting as “the most depressing hour that any of us spent in the White House during the President’s time there.” A State Department cable to the U.S. NATO mission said it all: Khrushchev’s second, public, letter had “diminished” hope for a settlement. The situation “is increasingly serious and time is growing shorter.” Recounting the loss of the U-2 and continuing Soviet ship movements toward the quarantine line, despite promises to the contrary, the cable advised that the United States “may find it necessary within a very short time in its own interest and that of its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere to take whatever military action may be necessary to remove this growing threat to the Hemisphere.”

At ten in the evening, after the Ex Comm had reviewed the gloomy prospects if Khrushchev rejected the president’s offer, Bobby asked McNamara, “How are you doing, Bob?” “Well. How about yourself?” McNamara replied. “All right,” Bobby said. “You got any doubts?” McNamara asked. ”No,” Bobby answered, “I think that we’re doing the only thing we can.” McNamara wanted to be sure that Moscow did not misread U.S. intentions. “I think the one thing, Bobby . . . we ought to seriously do before we attack them, you’ve got to be
damned sure they understand it’s coming
.”

They did. At a meeting of the entire Soviet presidium in a Moscow suburb, Khrushchev declared the need for a “retreat” in order to save Soviet power and the world from a nuclear catastrophe. As a prelude to a discussion on how to respond to Kennedy’s offer, the presidium authorized Soviet forces to repel a U.S. attack on Cuba if there were no settlement. During the presidium discussion, the arrival of Dobrynin’s report on his meeting with Bobby created a sense of urgency about ending the crisis. Khrushchev immediately dictated a letter accepting Kennedy’s terms and instructed that it be broadcast on the radio to ensure its prompt receipt in Washington before some incident triggered military action. At the same time, Khrushchev sent the president a secret communication expressing satisfaction at Kennedy’s promise to remove the Jupiters from Turkey in four or five months and promised to hold this agreement in confidence.

The Soviet broadcast, which was heard in Washington at 9:00
A.M.
Sunday morning, lifted a pall of apprehension from Kennedy and his Ex Comm advisers. Only the Joint Chiefs refused to take Khrushchev’s “surrender” at face value. Led by LeMay, they sent the president a letter recommending execution of the planned air strikes on Monday followed by the invasion unless there were “irrefutable evidence” of immediate Soviet action to remove the missile sites. They cautioned against a Soviet delaying tactic while they finished their missile buildup in preparation for “diplomatic blackmail.” A few days later, when Kennedy met with the Chiefs to thank them for their counsel and help during this most difficult period, they were not mollified. Admiral Anderson told the president, “We have been had!” LeMay called the settlement “the greatest defeat in our history,” and urged a prompt invasion. McNamara remembered Kennedy as “absolutely shocked” and “stuttering in reply.”

Kennedy told his advisers that the quarantine would continue until they could be sure that the terms of the agreement were met. He would remain uncomfortable with the continued presence of Soviet IL-28 bombers in Cuba, which had been omitted from the required elimination of offensive weapons. He also anticipated no end to communist subversion in the hemisphere and expected the two sides would be “toe to toe on Berlin” by the end of November. But for the moment, the danger of a Soviet-American war had receded. Kennedy urged everyone to be reserved and to avoid gloating, which would humiliate Khrushchev and only add to future difficulties between the United States and the USSR.

KHRUSHCHEV’S PROMISE
to remove the missiles from Cuba ended the immediate danger of a military clash, but Kennedy could not assume that the crisis was concluded. Although he was confident that Khrushchev had backed down rather than risk a nuclear war, he could not afford to take anything for granted. Khrushchev’s initial lies about the presence of offensive weapons made Kennedy unwilling to take him at his word. Bob Komer of the National Security Council encouraged the president’s suspicions: “We’ve given K. a bloody nose in a way very hard for USSR to take without attempting in some way to recoup. [The] whole image of Soviet ‘invincibility’ will be eroded if K. doesn’t do something.” Kennedy shared Komer’s concern: “We must operate on the presumption that the Russians may try again,” he told McNamara on November 5. “I am sure that we are watching for any developments by the Soviet Union of a submarine base in Cuba,” he wrote John McCone in December. “Will you keep me informed periodically as to whether or not anything of a suspicious nature has turned up in this regard?”