Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (31 page)

The Havana conference, observed Sorensen, “brought to my mind and Arthur’s and Bob McNamara’s—all of us who participated—as never before, how close the world came to stumbling into a nuclear exchange that would have escalated very quickly on both sides to a nuclear holocaust that would have left both countries in ruins, and soon most of the world as well.” The Joint Chiefs, Sorensen continued, “were certain that no nuclear warheads were in Cuba at the time. They were wrong.” If Kennedy had bowed to their pressure, Sorensen grimly concluded, the world would have been reduced to smoking rubble.

“There isn’t any learning period with nuclear weapons,” McNamara remarked during the Havana conference. “You make one mistake and you destroy nations.”

This is what McNamara tried to impress upon his military chiefs as the crisis was unfolding. After initiating the blockade, Kennedy ordered his defense secretary to keep close watch over the Navy to make sure U.S. vessels didn’t do anything that would trigger World War III. There was to be no shooting at Soviet ships without McNamara’s approval. But Admiral Anderson bridled under the defense secretary’s hands-on control, clashing with McNamara in the Navy’s Flag Plot room, the Pentagon command center where the blockade was being monitored. In a choleric outburst that would be dramatized in the 2000 film
Thirteen Days
, the admiral told his civilian boss that he didn’t need his advice on how to manage a blockade, the Navy had been carrying out such operations since the days of the Revolution. “I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done,” McNamara angrily replied. “I want to know what you are going to do—now.” Anderson suggested that McNamara leave the room: “Mr. Secretary, you go back to your office and I’ll go to mine and we’ll take care of things.”

“Apparently it was the wrong thing to say to somebody of McNamara’s personality,” the insubordinate admiral later remarked. As McNamara left the Flag Plot, he told his aide Roswell Gilpatric, “That’s the end of Anderson.”

Like his fellow chiefs, Anderson was eager to use the missile crisis “to solve the Cuban problem” by invading the island. “It could have been rather bloody, but I would say with a relatively low degree of casualties on the part of the American forces,” the admiral remarked in a 1981 interview for the U.S. Naval Institute. “I think the Cuban people would have immediately rallied to our support and I think we could have installed a good government in Cuba, and I think with the proper warnings to the Russians and care on our part, my belief is that there would not have been a military confrontation between the Russian troops that were there and ours, because there were relatively few Russians there. I don’t believe under any circumstances they would have fired those offensive weapons against the United States or it would have been nuclear warfare.”

Anderson was never given the opportunity to test his theories. Several months after the missile crisis, Kennedy and McNamara pushed the admiral out of the Navy, dispatching him as ambassador to Portugal, where he would become chummy with dictator Antonio Salazar, whom he described as “an extremely polite, decent, quiet man.” Before leaving the Pentagon, Anderson dropped by McNamara’s office, where the defense secretary tried to give him a parting handshake. The admiral, who regarded McNamara as a “vindictive” and “deceitful” man, refused his hand. “Shake hands with you? Hell, no.” McNamara invited him to sit down for a talk. “Mr. Secretary, your idea of integrity is so far removed from anything we are brought up with in the military,” the admiral brusquely told him during a lengthy conversation. “It’s the difference between night and day.” According to Anderson, McNamara burst into tears at this. Years later, you could still feel the admiral’s contempt. The Kennedy civilians were nothing but crybabies in suits.

The Joint Chiefs were not alone in trying to maneuver the United States into war over the Cuban missile installations. The CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis. CIA director John McCone, who was the first administration official to charge the Soviets were inserting missiles into Cuba, made no secret of his desire for a shooting war over the new threat. In the weeks before the crisis exploded, the agency began leaking information about the missiles to friendly reporters like Hal Hendrix of the
Miami News
—who later won a Pulitzer for his “scoops”—as well as to Republican Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, who used the intelligence tips to politically embarrass the Kennedy administration.

During the height of the crisis, President Kennedy instructed the CIA to immediately stop all raids against Cuba, to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration. But, once again, the agency asserted its right to determine its own Cuba policy, independent of the president’s will. In defiance of Kennedy’s order, Bill Harvey mobilized sixty commandos—“every single team and asset that we could scrape together”—and dropped them into Cuba, in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow. When somebody in the JM/WAVE station tipped off Robert Kennedy to Harvey’s reckless act, the attorney general hit the roof, ripping into the CIA official at a Mongoose meeting for risking World War III. An unrepentant Harvey shot back that if the Kennedys had taken care of the Cuba problem at the Bay of Pigs, the country would not be stuck in the current mess. The attorney general stormed out of the room. Years later, at his appearance before the Church Committee, the CIA man was still dismissive of Kennedy’s concerns, shrugging them off as “persnickety.”

But for the Kennedys, it was one more demonstration of the intelligence agency’s cowboy nature. “Of course, I was furious,” Bobby later said, recalling Harvey’s wildly provocative act. He was astounded that a CIA official would risk nuclear doomsday “with a half-assed operation like this.”

Watching the eruption between Kennedy and Harvey, McCone knew that the career of his Cuba point man had just imploded. “Harvey has destroyed himself today,” the CIA director told an aide. The Kennedy “tirade” against Harvey was “so severe,” according to an FBI memo, “that McCone felt it would be appropriate to move Harvey from Washington, D.C., for a few days.” Later, Dick Helms came to Harvey’s rescue, transferring him to the agency’s Rome station, where he would be out of Kennedy’s line of fire. The legendary spy would drink his way through his brief Roman exile, until he was brought back to CIA headquarters.

Before Harvey departed for Rome, his colleagues threw him a bon voyage party, where they staged a dramatization of the life and death of Julius Caesar, with Harvey in the lead role. As the sketch concluded, someone shouted, “Who was Brutus?” In a flat voice, Harvey said, “Bobby,” a man whom by then he regarded as “treasonous.”

His career was essentially finished. But throughout his decline and fall at the CIA, Harvey continued to stay in touch with his old Mafia comrade-in-arms Johnny Rosselli. The two men were spotted together in Florida, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., conferring over their usual refreshments—martinis for the spy and Smirnoff on the rocks for the gangster. When Harvey retired from the agency and set up his own law firm in Washington, Rosselli dropped by to see his old friend and threw him some business. The retired spy refused to distance himself from the mobster, even under pressure from the agency. Bill Harvey never apologized for the odd relationship. “Regardless of how he may have made his living in the past,” Harvey would later tell Senate investigators, Johnny Rosselli was a man of “integrity as far as I was concerned.” The gangster was loyal and dependable “in his dealings with me,” said Harvey. He had “a very high estimate” of the man.

President Kennedy’s isolation within his own government was never so glaringly apparent as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the ExComm meetings (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) where Kennedy thrashed out his strategy, he could count on only his brother and McNamara for support. Bobby, who matured from a kneejerk hawk to a wise and restrained diplomat during the nerve-punishing crucible, played an especially critical role. “Thank God for Bobby,” Dave Powers heard the president remark one morning as his brother strode into another tension-filled ExComm meeting. The humanity-threatening crisis forced the younger Kennedy to confront a fundamental question about the use of power in the nuclear age. “What, if any, circumstance or justification gives…any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?” he asked himself. As Schlesinger later observed, it was a question few statesmen ever raised and few philosophers answered.

Robert Kennedy was the key courier for his brother in the delicate back-channel negotiations that finally brought an end to the crisis, secretly meeting with Georgi Bolshakov until the Kennedys realized that their old Soviet chum had been used by Moscow to deceive them, and later Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev offered a startling account of RFK’s emotional conversations with Dobrynin, in which Kennedy stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on. It was not the first time in the Kennedy presidency that Bobby had communicated this alarming message to the Russians. But in this high-stakes moment, Kennedy’s plea struck Khrushchev as especially urgent.

After the attorney general paid an unofficial visit to the Soviet embassy one evening, Dobrynin reported to Moscow that “Robert Kennedy looked exhausted. One could see from his eyes that he had not slept for days. He himself said that he had not been home for six days and nights. ‘The president is in a grave situation,’ Robert Kennedy said, ‘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…. President Kennedy implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer and to take into consideration the peculiarities of the American system. Even though the president himself is 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.”

On another occasion, Khrushchev wrote, Bobby Kennedy “was almost crying” when he phoned Dobrynin. “I haven’t seen my children for days now,” he told the Soviet ambassador, “and the president hasn’t seen his either. We’re spending all day and night at the White House; I don’t know how much longer we can hold out against our generals.”

Kennedy loyalists like Schlesinger—who prefer to see the brothers’ management of the crisis as certain and masterful, which in many respects it was—suggest that Bobby Kennedy’s emotional pleas to the Soviets were a tactic to win leverage in the negotiations. President Kennedy was never afflicted by doubts when it came to standing up to the Pentagon, Schlesinger observed recently: “JFK had a great capacity to resist pressures from the military. He simply thought he was right. Lack of self-confidence was never one of Jack Kennedy’s problems. We would’ve had nuclear war if Nixon had been president during the missile crisis. But Kennedy’s war hero status allowed him to defy the Joint Chiefs. He dismissed them as a bunch of old men.”

Still, as Schlesinger has acknowledged, Kennedy was not firmly in control of his own military. And the repeated references to coups and
Seven Days in May
scenarios that pop up in presidential transcripts and recollections about the administration make it plain that JFK himself, and his closest advisors, worried about the stability of the government.

So did Khrushchev. “For some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” he later wrote, “and now he was admitting this to us himself.” Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”

Thirteen days after the crisis began, Khrushchev announced that he would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. The Soviet decision was heralded as a major U.S. victory, a dramatic demonstration of the power of American resolve. The Kennedys encouraged this media spin, though they had secretly made their own concessions to end the showdown, agreeing to quietly withdraw aging Jupiter missiles from U.S bases in Turkey and pledging not to invade Cuba. This latter concession was particularly critical from the Soviet point of view, since it was the military threat hanging over Cuba that had prompted Khrushchev to install the missiles. Washington officials would later insist this pledge was not binding because Castro refused to allow U.S. weapons inspections of Cuba to make sure the missiles were gone. But Kennedy and future presidents would nonetheless honor the no-invasion pledge. It essentially ensured the survival of the Cuban revolution, and though Castro did not see it that way at the time, Khrushchev correctly called it “a great victory” for the embattled island.

While the Kennedy media offensive successfully sold the story that “the other guy blinked,” Washington hardliners saw the resolution of the crisis differently. A few days after Khrushchev’s announcement, the president summoned the Joint Chiefs to the Oval Office to thank them for their role in the crisis, a particularly gracious gesture considering the friction between the commander-in-chief and his generals. But LeMay was in no mood to celebrate. “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” he thundered at Kennedy. “We should invade today!” The anti-Kennedy rage was widespread among the upper ranks, where it was felt the president had flinched at the perfect opportunity to dismantle Cuba’s Communist regime. “We had a chance to throw the Communists out of Cuba,” a disgusted LeMay later fumed. “But the administration was scared to death [the Russians] might shoot a missile at us.”