Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (40 page)

It is striking that Kennedy had not directly consulted the military chiefs before deciding to introduce a blockade. Should the blockade fail, he would resort to military steps, and so needed the Chiefs on board for that, but, assuming that they would be single-minded in their call for attacks, he held them at arm’s length. Moreover, his memories of the naval officers he had seen in action during World War II and their advice before the Bay of Pigs had deepened his distrust. The Army’s slow response to the Mississippi violence had added to his doubts about the military’s competence. After the Army’s failure to act quickly, Kennedy said, “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” It wasn’t until the morning of October 19 that Kennedy finally brought the Chiefs into the discussion, but only for forty-five minutes.

The meeting confirmed his assumption about their views. At the start of the discussion, Taylor said that the Chiefs were agreed on a surprise air strike followed by surveillance to assure against further threats and a blockade to prevent shipments of additional weapons. Kennedy responded by telling the Chiefs that he saw no “satisfactory alternatives” but considered a blockade the least likely to lead to a disastrous nuclear war.

LeMay responded forcefully in opposition to anything but direct military action. Moreover, he dismissed the president’s observation that if the United States hit the Soviet missiles in Cuba, they would respond by taking Berlin. On the contrary, he said, hitting the missiles would deter the Soviets, and a failure to destroy the offensive weapons in Cuba would encourage Moscow to move against Berlin. “This blockade and political action, I see leading into war,” he added. “It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich. . . . I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention right now.” Admiral George Anderson, the Navy chief of staff, General Earle Wheeler, and Marine Commandant David Shoup voiced the same conclusion: “The full gamut of military action,” as Wheeler put it.

LeMay then commented on “the political factor,” which, he said to Kennedy, “you invited us to comment on . . . at one time.” Reminding Kennedy that he had “made some pretty strong statements . . . that we would take action against offensive weapons, 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 are in a pretty bad fix at the present time.” Offended by LeMay’s bluntness and suggestion that he was acting like Britain’s Chamberlain, Kennedy asked: “What did you say?” “You’re in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay replied, refusing to back down. Masking his anger with a contrived laugh, Kennedy said, “You’re in there with me.”

After Kennedy, McNamara, and Taylor left the meeting, the tape recorder caught the Chiefs attacking Kennedy. Shoup told LeMay: “You pulled the rug right out from under him.” “What the hell do you mean?” LeMay asked. Shoup explained: “I agree with you a hundred percent,” adding that escalation by small steps was a terrible idea. “If somebody could keep them from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal. That’s our problem. You go in there and friggin’ around with the missiles. You’re screwed. . . . Either do this son of bitch and do it right, and quit friggin’ around.” Wheeler saw no chance of it: “It was very apparent to me,” he said, “that the political action of a blockade is really what he” wants.

Kennedy was also angry. When deputy defense secretary Roswell Gilpatric saw him after he left the meeting, he thought the president “was just choleric. He was just beside himself, as close as he ever got.” Kennedy then told Kenny O’Donnell, “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we . . . do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

While Kennedy had concluded that a blockade was his best option for removing the missiles without a war, he wanted to ensure a consensus that precluded any public dissent by his advisers, especially the military chiefs, who could wound him politically if the blockade failed to remove the missiles and he had to resort to air attacks and possibly an invasion. The Chiefs could paint him as hesitant to use force and complain about losses resulting from the absence of surprise. Determined to keep the public in the dark until he rather than someone in Congress or the media revealed the crisis, Kennedy left on a campaign trip to the Midwest on Friday, October 19. He instructed Bobby to “pull the group together” to allow him to say later that all hands supported the blockade.

As Kennedy campaigned in Illinois and Ohio, his advisers met at the State Department, where they debated the choice between an air strike and a blockade. When a tentative commitment to a blockade was described as the current state of thinking, Taylor dissented, saying the Joints Chiefs shared his view. Bundy declared his shift from the previous day favoring non-action to air strikes, which he considered much more likely to remove the missiles than a blockade. Acheson predictably chimed in with a plea for a decisive air strike: They needed to understand that they were now dealing with an irresponsible “madman.” “We had better act and act quickly,” he warned. Dillon and McCone agreed, and Taylor predicted that imposing a blockade would mean abandoning an air assault or at least one that could be highly effective. McNamara said that he would order preparations for a prompt air attack but continued to prefer a blockade.

Bobby Kennedy now made clear what the president wanted. Grinning with perhaps the satisfaction of knowing that he was giving marching orders to a group of men unaccustomed to taking rather than giving direction, Bobby explained that he had spoken to his brother that morning and that the president saw no room for a surprise attack. It would evoke memories of Pearl Harbor. A blockade would make clear the administration’s determination to get the missiles out of Cuba, but it would also “allow the Soviets some room for maneuver to pull back from their over-extended position.” After some further discussion, Bobby agreed that a blockade could be a first step with an air strike in reserve if the Soviets did not take out the missiles.

Despite his show of confidence, Bobby called his brother and persuaded him to return to Washington on Saturday instead of Sunday to hammer home what he wanted. Pretending to have a cold, Kennedy returned to Washington to attend an afternoon National Security Council meeting at the White House. The session, the longest yet of the discussions, lasted two hours and forty minutes and included twenty-two officials, among them the president, Bobby, and all the principal advisers from the CIA, the Defense, State, and Treasury departments as well as Taylor, Bundy, and Sorensen. The discussion was essentially a rehash of now-familiar arguments, with Taylor pressing for full-scale air strikes and the president reiterating his preference for a blockade, with air attacks against only missiles and missile sites if the Soviets refused to remove the offensive weapons.

At a second NSC meeting lasting more than two hours the following day, the focus shifted to a presidential address in which Kennedy intended to demand “nothing less than the ending of the missile capability now in Cuba.” He agreed, however, to use the word “quarantine” instead of “blockade” to avoid comparisons with the 1948 Soviet disruption of land traffic into Berlin. He also directed that a letter to Khrushchev be prepared saying how perilous the Soviet leader’s actions were and how eager the United States was “to resume the path of peaceful negotiation.”

On Monday, October 22, Kennedy implemented his decision to establish a blockade around Cuba: He instructed that “everyone should sing one song in order to make clear that there was now no difference among his advisers”; formally established an ExCOM of the NSC with him as chairman to meet every morning at ten in the Cabinet Room until the crisis ended; met with congressional leaders at the White House to explain his actions; and sent Khrushchev a letter with a copy of a speech he would make that evening. The letter explained why he was establishing a blockade: It was “the minimum necessary to remove the threat to the security of the nations of this hemisphere.” In choosing a blockade, he “assumed that neither you nor any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.”

The initial Soviet response was discouraging and even frightening. Khrushchev replied on October 23 that Kennedy’s statement of the problem represented a “serious threat to peace and security of peoples.” He described the blockade as “aggressive actions against Cuba and against the Soviet Union” and insisted that the weapons in Cuba were “exclusively for defensive purposes.” Kennedy replied that evening describing “the current chain of events” as the result of Moscow’s “offensive weapons” in Cuba, asked that Khrushchev issue “the necessary instructions to your ships to observe the terms of the quarantine,” and expressed “concern that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is.”

That evening, at the end of an NSC meeting, the president and Bobby talked for ten minutes about the coming confrontation with Khrushchev. “How does it look?” Bobby asked. “Looks like hell—looks real mean, doesn’t it?” Kennedy replied. “But . . . there is no other choice. If they get this mean on this one, it’s just a question of where they go about it next.” Bobby agreed. But it wasn’t just the Soviet threat that needed answering as a way to avoid another Munich; the Congress also worried them: Without the quarantine, Bobby said, “You would have been impeached.” Kennedy thought that was right and feared that after the elections the House would try to impeach him anyway for having been slow to respond to the Soviet aggression. But the larger concern was “the great danger and risk in all of this,” which he saw as “a miscalculation—a mistake in judgment.” Having recently read Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August
, a searing account of how “the Germans, the Austrians, the French, and the British . . . somehow seemed to tumble into war . . . through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur,” he feared that while “neither side wanted war over Cuba,” they could find themselves in a conflict for “reasons of ‘security,’ ‘pride’ or ‘face.’” Kennedy was determined not to repeat the German chancellor’s response in 1914 to the question, “How did it all happen?” Which was: “Ah, if only we knew.”

October 24 was a day of near despair followed by hope. Bobby recorded that at a meeting the previous night with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, when he asked if Soviet ships heading for Cuba would try to run the blockade, Dobrynin assumed they would. U.S. readiness for a war had been increased from Defense Condition 3 to DEFCON 2, a prelude to a general war. The Strategic Air Command was put on a nuclear alert: Land- and submarine-based missiles were poised to attack, as were the country’s 1,400-plus bombers loaded with nuclear weapons aimed at preselected Soviet targets. “In fifteen years of intercepting U.S. military messages,” historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali point out, “the Soviet military intelligence service may never have seen anything like this.”

McCone reported at the morning’s ExCOM meeting that the Russians were making rapid progress on the intermediate- and medium-range missile sites. Numerous Soviet ships were heading toward the island, including submarines and three possibly carrying missiles. The Soviets were also bringing their “military forces into a complete state of readiness.”

Bobby recalled that the Wednesday ExCOM meeting “seemed the most trying, the most difficult, and the most filled with tension. . . . I sat across from the President. This was the moment we had prepared for, which we hoped would never come. The danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all. . . . These few minutes were the time of greatest worry by the President. His hand went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust and had we done something wrong? . . . I felt we were on the edge of a precipice and it was as if there were no way off.”

There were also hopeful signs of a Soviet retreat. As McNamara discussed plans for intercepting the Soviet vessels, McCone was handed a message saying that six Soviet ships in Cuban waters had either stopped or reversed course. The blockade seemed to be persuading the Soviets to back away from a confrontation. Rusk whispered to Bundy, who was sitting next to him, “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” At an afternoon meeting with the president, Rusk said that the Kremlin’s public silence about the missiles in Cuba meant they were trying to avoid a war scare. He also thought it significant that Khrushchev had sent a telegram to the British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell, saying: “The Soviet Union will take no rash actions, will not let itself be provoked by the unjustified actions of the United States. We will do everything which depends on us to prevent the launching of a war.”

Yet the crisis was far from over. Kennedy wanted to be sure that there were no plans to grab any of the Soviet ships. McNamara thought not, but Bobby and Rusk asked if the Navy was instructed not to pursue the retreating vessels. Mindful of how some unplanned event could trigger a conflict, Kennedy sent McNamara to the Navy’s operations center in the Pentagon to make sure that ship commanders on quarantine duty strictly followed his orders to let the Soviet vessels retreat without incident. Navy chief of staff Admiral George Anderson was unhappy about the visit from McNamara and Gilpatric, which he saw as unneeded civilian interference. McNamara’s questions about Navy’s plans for stopping ships provoked Anderson to answer that the Navy had been doing this since John Paul Jones and he saw no reason to explain long-standing procedures. He waved a copy of the Navy regulations manual at McNamara and urged him to read it. “I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done,” McNamara exploded. “I want to know what you are going to do now.” McNamara left in a huff, declaring, “That’s the end of Anderson.” (After the crisis, Kennedy forced his retirement and made him ambassador to Portugal.) It also deepened Kennedy’s distrust of his military advisers. If he was going to avert a disaster, part of his challenge was to keep control of headstrong subordinates.