Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (39 page)

The recorded conversations give us a good idea of how the president and his advisers were responding to the crisis, but there are no records of what Kennedy’s advisers thought and felt as they retired for the evening to the privacy of their homes. One can only imagine the tension all of them experienced as they considered the gravity of the problem facing them. If they agreed to steps that led to war with Moscow, it was almost too awful to contemplate. Their decision, or, more to the point, their advice and Kennedy’s decision could decisively affect hundreds of millions of lives. None of them could escape the sense of responsibility for what they would urge Kennedy to do. And if Kennedy was not entirely mindful of what the crisis could bring, Stevenson hammered home the potential horror they faced with a letter to him saying, “The means adopted here have such incalculable consequences that I feel you should have made it clear that the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is negotiable before we start anything” (
negotiable
was double underlined). Stevenson added, “blackmail and intimidation
never
, negotiation and sanity always.”

Only Kennedy has left a record of sorts on how the burden of governing was affecting him. We know that he shared McNamara’s forebodings about the horrors of a nuclear war and that the responsibility of the decision weighed heavily on him. His medical records kept by Dr. Janet Travell, one of his principal physicians, give us some understanding of how the crisis took its toll on him. As a rule, he relied on antispasmodics to control a spastic colon; antibiotics to combat urinary tract problems and sinusitis; and hydrocortisone, testosterone, and salt tablets to manage his Addison’s disease. During the crisis, Travell increased the amounts of the last three to ensure that his Addison’s or adrenal problems did not get out of hand and sap his energy or reduce the flow of adrenaline and capacity to concentrate. When he had to speak publicly to the country and world about the crisis, for example, he relied on additional amounts of the hydrocortisone and salt tablets to prepare him for the challenge.

During this time, Jackie Kennedy asked the president’s gastroenterologist to stop the antihistamines he was taking for food allergies. She complained that they were having a “depressing action” on him and asked that the doctor prescribe a medication that would produce “mood elevation.” The physician put him on a small dose of Stelazine, an antipsychotic drug that was also prescribed to control anxiety, which was what it was supposed to do for Kennedy. A decided improvement in Kennedy’s emotional state allowed him to get off the drug after only two days.

The recorded conversations with his advisers give no indication of someone overwhelmed by current pressures and suggest that the medicines allowed him to function as effectively as any president hoped to in a grave crisis. The fact that Kennedy had hidden his health problems from the public may have been essential in helping him win a very close election for the White House. Happily, in 1962, as far as anyone can tell, Kennedy’s health troubles did not reduce his capacity to muster the necessary energy and act sensibly in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

By Thursday morning, October 18, when Kennedy met with his advisers again, they had identified four possible actions to remove the missiles: an ultimatum to Khrushchev followed by an attack if he failed to take the missiles out of Cuba; an unannounced air raid against only the missile sites; a message telling Khrushchev that the United States was establishing a naval blockade around Cuba; or a large-scale air strike followed by an invasion.

Douglas Dillon and George Ball weighed in with more elaborate and passionate memoranda underscoring the divide among advisers and the momentous consequences of the president’s decision. Dillon saw no room for negotiations and little alternative to military action. He opposed any request to Khrushchev for talks, arguing instead for a blockade and demands for the removal of the missiles. An immediate air strike should follow a Castro refusal. He warned that the nation’s survival depended on the prompt elimination of the Soviet weapons in Cuba. Why the United States could not live with the missiles left in place was left unsaid.

Ball disagreed. He thought the missiles made little strategic difference. He compared a surprise air offensive to Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which had justified war crime trials against Japanese leaders. Such an attack on Cuba would bring condemnation from world opinion as a violation of American traditions and professed moral standards. Ball urged a blockade that he believed would cripple and bring down Castro’s government.

As the advisers convened in the Cabinet Room at 11:10
A.M.
, up-to-date reconnaissance photos showed intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) sites, which had twice the range of MRBMs and carried warheads of roughly twice as much yield. Kennedy was told that these more powerful missiles brought the continental United States, except the Pacific Northwest, within range. Rusk and McNamara reacted to the news with anger and assertions that military strikes might need to replace the diplomatic track they had favored earlier. Remembering the appeasement of the thirties, Rusk worried about “the effect on the Soviets if we were to do nothing.” But he feared that the Soviet response to air raids and a possible invasion of Cuba would lead to a dangerous escalation. So, everything considered, he favored discussions with Khrushchev, who “might realize that he’s got to back down.” It could “prevent a great conflict.”

McNamara was more supportive of military action now than Rusk. He said that he had conferred with the Chiefs and shared their conviction that a full invasion might be in order. Kennedy asked McNamara why the new information changed the recommendation. McNamara still believed that the missiles in Cuba did not change the military equation between the United States and the Soviet Union. But he was willing to back the Chiefs’ call for action out of political considerations. If they didn’t act, how could any of America’s allies continue to trust us; or expect Khrushchev to take U.S. deterrence seriously; or expect domestic public opinion to back the administration? While Taylor endorsed McNamara’s support of strong measures, he disputed his assumption that it was strictly or largely a political matter. He shared the Chiefs’ view that Khrushchev was turning Cuba into “a forward base, of major importance to the Soviets.”

Kennedy was not convinced by the advice urging prompt air strikes and a possible invasion—either for military or political reasons. He discounted McNamara’s assertion that the use of force was essential to hold the alliance together. Most allies do not see Cuba as a serious military threat, he said: “They think we are slightly demented on this subject.” They would see an air attack on Cuba as “a mad act by the United States.” Kennedy was also skeptical about the wisdom of landing U.S. troops in Cuba: “Nobody knows what kind of success we’re going to have with this invasion,” he said. “Invasions are tough, hazardous,” as the Bay of Pigs had demonstrated. He leaned toward some kind of diplomatic initiative; he wanted to know what would be the best method of quick communication with Khrushchev. And the more important decision was, “What action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.”

If Kennedy needed support for a political initiative before they resorted to armed force, he found it in the advice of two American Soviet experts, Charles Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson. The fifty-eight-year-old Bohlen was an American aristocrat. The offspring of a privileged family, he was schooled at St. Paul’s and Harvard. After travels abroad, including a few months in China, he decided on a Foreign Service career with a focus on the Soviet Union. Years of service in the Moscow embassy had led Eisenhower, against Secretary of State John F. Dulles’s wishes, to make him ambassador from 1953 to 1957. Tensions with Dulles over Bohlen’s support for accommodations with the Soviet Union had forced him to leave Moscow, but it gave him standing with Democrats who admired his courage in standing up to right-wing Republicans, including Joe McCarthy, who had failed to block his appointment to Russia. Before Bohlen sailed in October 1962 for Paris, where Kennedy had made him ambassador to France, the president had consulted him about Khrushchev’s motives and how he thought the crisis with Moscow could be resolved.

As he left Washington, Bohlen sent the president a letter saying that the missiles had to be forced out of Cuba by either diplomatic or military means. But diplomacy should be first; this advice reflected Bohlen’s long-standing belief in a shared Soviet-American desire to avoid a war. A message to Khrushchev was an essential first step. Bohlen did not think it would impede later possible military steps. An attack without a prior diplomatic initiative would provoke a war with Cuba that would antagonize America’s allies. “I feel very strongly that . . . a limited, quick action,” he wrote, “is an illusion and would lead us into a total war with Cuba on a step-by-step basis which would greatly increase the probability of general war.” The letter echoed Kennedy’s fears and strengthened the president’s resolve to find an alternative to military action.

Bohlen’s departure for France had provoked some debate. He persuaded Kennedy that his staying in Washington would alert the press to the crisis and that Llewellyn Thompson, ambassador to Moscow, who had comparable expertise on the Soviet Union and held similar views to his, could speak for both of them. Bohlen’s departure, however, infuriated Bobby Kennedy, who later complained that “Chip Bohlen ran out on us—which always shocked me. . . . That wasn’t necessary; he could always have postponed it. We said he could fly over, but he decided to leave this country in a crisis . . . when he had been working with all of us for such a long period of time.” But the president disagreed with his brother’s assessment and let Bohlen go to Paris.

Kennedy was also content to have Thompson as his principal adviser on likely Russian reactions to U.S. initiatives. Thompson had served as Bohlen’s successor in Moscow and had been brought back from the embassy in June to become the State Department’s principal Soviet expert. The fifty-eight-year-old Thompson was respected as a long-serving diplomat without a political agenda. As the U.S. expert who knew Khrushchev better than anyone else, he had a keen sense of his potential reactions to various policies as well as the likely response of others in the Soviet Union, including their interest in restraining Khrushchev. Thompson recalled for Kennedy an incident in 1960 during the U-2 crisis, when Soviet generals made clear to Thompson that Khrushchev was acting rashly. Thompson thought that Khrushchev might again be at odds with his military chiefs and that negotiating proposals might pressure him into conciliatory talks.

Thompson unequivocally supported a blockade. He believed that it would prevent the shipment of additional weapons to Cuba and would ultimately compel Khrushchev to dismantle the existing sites. Kennedy agreed that a blockade seemed unlikely to provoke a nuclear war, but he worried that Khrushchev would move against Berlin. Thompson was convinced that Khrushchev wanted to negotiate. If the United States bombed the missile sites, he said, Khrushchev would retaliate by taking “out one of our bases in Turkey . . . and then say: ‘Now I want to talk.’” Khrushchev’s “whole purpose of this exercise is to build up to talks with you, in which we try to negotiate out the bases.”

Bobby saw problems with a blockade. It not only posed a threat to Berlin, but was also “a very slow death,” with dangers in stopping and examining Russian ships and shooting down Russian planes that tried to land in Cuba. Whatever you do, Thompson advised, he urged Kennedy to make it as easy as possible for Khrushchev to back down. He thought Bobby’s point was weakened by the likelihood that negotiations during the blockade would deter both sides from aggressive action.

McCone, who had sat silently, now reported that Eisenhower wouldn’t support anything short of a military response. It was McCone’s trump card for trying to force Kennedy into the sort of actions favored by the Chiefs. But it was clear to Thompson and Bobby that, while Kennedy had his doubts about the effectiveness of a blockade, he was not ready to risk a nuclear war with a full-scale assault. Thompson reinforced the president’s reluctance by predicting that if the United States killed Russians in an attack, it would mean war. And Bobby, reflecting his brother’s doubts, declared, “I think George Ball has a hell of a good point.” “What?” Kennedy asked, eager to hear Ball’s argument again. Bobby replied that the world would ask, “What kind of a country we are. . . . We did this against Cuba.” We had consistently decried the threat of a Soviet first strike. “Now, . . . we do that to a small country. I think it’s a hell of a burden to carry.” Rusk agreed: It would be like carrying “the mark of Cain” on our brows. McNamara concurred, and Thompson said that it was essential that we not reject negotiations, which step would make a war inevitable.

After two days of discussion, they were still without a plan. Although McNamara acknowledged that no one had an ideal solution, he thought they needed to settle on a clear-cut diagram. McNamara tried to sum up their choices as the meeting came to an end: One was prompt military action, and the other was the slow move toward armed attacks, but only after setting up a blockade accompanied by an ultimatum to Khrushchev to remove the missiles. McNamara leaned toward the second option in the belief that it would not shatter any of the country’s alliances and might facilitate an exchange in which the United States removed its missiles from Turkey and Italy at the same time Khrushchev took his out of Cuba.

A series of evening meetings made clear that Kennedy favored a blockade. Robert Lovett, whom Kennedy had brought into the discussions out of an eagerness to hear from the most experienced people he knew, suggested that they follow the State Department’s legal adviser’s suggestion that they call it a quarantine, which would define the action as more of a defensive measure than an act of war. As notes Kennedy made after these talks showed, Lovett especially influenced him: His long experience in government and reputation for moderate good sense helped sway Kennedy. By contrast with Acheson, who urged prompt military action, and Bundy, who opposed either an attack or a blockade as likely to cause the loss of Berlin and divide NATO, Lovett thought the blockade was the best way to resolve the crisis, with force as a last resort.