Kennedy (122 page)

His own analysis regarded the third and fifth theories as offering likely but insufficient motives and he leaned most strongly to the first. But whichever theory was correct, it was clear that the Soviet move, if successful, would “materially…and politically change the balance of power” in the entire cold war, as he would later comment. Undertaken in secrecy, accompanied by duplicity, the whole effort was based on confronting Kennedy and the world in November with a threatening
fait accompli
, designed perhaps to be revealed by Khrushchev personally, we speculated, in a bristling UN speech, to be followed by a cocky demand for a summit on Berlin and other matters. With these somber thoughts in mind, our Tuesday morning meeting ended; and I went down the hall to my office with a sense of deep foreboding and heavy responsibility.

My recollection of the ninety-six hours that followed is a blur of meetings and discussions, mornings, afternoons, evenings. The proposals varied, their proponents varied, our progress varied. In order to clear my desk, particularly of the President’s campaign speeches for that week, I did not attend any of the preliminary meetings held that afternoon. One was in the Pentagon, where McNamara and the Joint Chiefs executed the President’s instructions to alert our forces for any contingency and to be ready in a week for any military action against Cuba. The other principal meeting that afternoon was in the State Department, where Soviet motives and possible actions were discussed. Both meetings imposed extra-tight security. Also meeting that afternoon and every morning thereafter was the United States Intelligence Board, on which the State and military intelligence officers were represented with the CIA.

At 6:30
P.M
. we met again with the President in the Cabinet Room, as we would regularly for the next several weeks. That Tuesday was
the first of thirteen days of decision unlike any other in the Kennedy years—or, indeed, inasmuch as this was the first direct nuclear confrontation, unlike any in the history of our planet.

Much misinformation has been written about this series of meetings, about who said what, and about such terms as “hawks and doves,” “think tank,” “Ex Comm” and “Trollope ploy” which I never heard used at the time. With all due respect to those Cabinet and other officers sometimes credited in these accounts with shaping our deliberations when the President was absent, the best performer in this respect was the Attorney General—not because of any particular idea he advanced, not because he presided (no one did), but because of his constant prodding, questioning, eliciting arguments and alternatives and keeping the discussions concrete and moving ahead, a difficult task as different participants came in and out. Bundy and I sought to assist in this role. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of those meetings was a sense of complete equality. Protocol mattered little when the nation’s life was at stake. Experience mattered little in a crisis which had no precedent. Even rank mattered little when secrecy prevented staff support. We were fifteen individuals on our own, representing the President and not different departments. Assistant Secretaries differed vigorously with their Secretaries; I participated much more freely than I ever had in an NSC meeting; and the absence of the President encouraged everyone to speak his mind.

It was after noting these tendencies in a Wednesday afternoon meeting, held while the President fulfilled a campaign commitment in Connecticut, that I recommended he authorize more such preparatory meetings without his presence. He agreed, and these meetings continued in George Ball’s conference room on the State Department’s seventh floor. But inasmuch as some or all of us met daily with the President, those meetings over which he did not preside—held chiefly while he maintained his normal schedule for the sake of appearances and to carry out other duties—were not formulating policy or even alternatives without his knowledge. And when he did preside, recognizing that lower-ranking advisers such as Thompson would not voluntarily contradict their superiors in front of the President, and that persuasive advisers such as McNamara unintentionally silenced less articulate men, he took pains to seek everyone’s individual views. In sharp contrast with his first Cuban crisis, when he had conferred with a somewhat different group, he knew his men, we knew each other, and all weighed the consequences of failure.

As the week wore on, the tireless work of the aerial photographers and photo interpreters gave an even greater sense of urgency to our deliberations. More MRBM sites were discovered, for a total of six. They were no longer recognizable only, in the President’s words, “to the most
sophisticated expert.” Their construction had proceeded at such a pace in those few days that there could be no mistaking the Soviet intention to have them operational much earlier than we had anticipated on Tuesday. The literally miles of film taken of the island—which was blanketed daily with six or seven flights—now revealed excavations for three IRBM sites as well. The 2,200-mile IRBMs, when readied in December, would be capable of reaching virtually any part of the continental United States. At these locations, too, the fields and wooded areas photographed in earlier coverage had suddenly been transformed into networks of roads, tents, equipment and construction, all completely manned and closely guarded by Soviet personnel only.

The knowledge that time was running out dominated our discussions and kept us meeting late into the night. The stepped-up U-2 flights had apparently not alerted the Soviets to our discovery. But we had to formulate and declare our position, said the President, before they knew we knew, before the matter leaked out to the public and before the missiles became operational.

Despite the fatiguing hours and initially sharp divisions, our meetings avoided any loss of temper and frequently were lightened by a grim humor. Each of us changed his mind more than once that week on the best course of action to take—not only because new facts and arguments were adduced but because, in the President’s words, “whatever action we took had so many disadvantages to it and each…raised the prospect that it might escalate the Soviet Union into a nuclear war.”

It was an agonizing prospect. In no other period during my service in the White House did I wake up in the middle of the night, reviewing the deliberations of that evening and trying to puzzle out a course of action. Not one of us at any time believed that any of the choices before us could bring anything but either prolonged danger or fighting, very possibly leading to the kind of deepening commitment of prestige and power from which neither side could withdraw without resort to nuclear weapons.

The Soviet statement of September 11 had warned that any U.S. military action against Cuba would unleash nuclear war. What would Khrushchev actually do if we bombed the missile sites—or blockaded the island—or invaded? What would we do in return, and what would his reaction be then? These were the questions we asked that week. Among the locations listed as possible targets for Soviet retaliation were West Berlin (first on everyone’s list, and therefore the subject of a special subcommittee of our group established by the President); Turkey (because our exposed Jupiter missiles there were most likely to be equated with the Soviet missiles in Cuba); Iran (where the Soviets had a tactical advantage comparable to ours in the Caribbean and a long-standing
desire for control); Pakistan, Scandinavia and Italy. Nor could we worry only about Soviet retaliation. Castro, not known for his steady reactions, might order an attack on Guantánamo, on Florida or on whatever planes or ships we employed. He might also order the execution of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. The news that week that Red China had attacked India made us wonder whether this was a coincidence or whether a whole round of conflagrations would include Formosa, Korea and the Indochinese peninsula. The most dire possibility of all was that the Soviets might conclude—from a similar analysis of measures and countermeasures, as seen from their point of view—that all-out war was inevitable and thereupon launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States to make certain they hit us first.

The fact that Khrushchev had already made one major miscalculation—in thinking he could get away with missiles in Cuba—increased the danger that he would make more. Our predictions of the outcome were further clouded by the Soviet Chairman’s known penchant for surprise, by the difficulty of halting an escalation once started, and by the possibility that he was deliberately trying to provoke us into an attack on Cuba to facilitate his moving on Berlin (just as the Suez invasion of 1956 had confused the opposition to his suppression of Hungary). We prepared all the arguments distinguishing Cuba from West Berlin—e.g., the latter was not a site for strategic weapons, and the U.S. had suggested an internationally supervised plebiscite to determine the wishes of its citizens—but we doubted that such distinctions would impress the Soviets.

We could not even be certain they would impress our allies. Most Western Europeans cared nothing about Cuba and thought we were overanxious about it. They had long accustomed themselves to living next door to Soviet missiles. Would they support our risking a world war, or an attack on NATO member Turkey, or a move on West Berlin, because we now had a few dozen hostile missiles nearby? And would not any disarray in the Alliance weaken both our Cuba posture and our Berlin defense? On the other hand, if we failed to respond, would that not confirm the fears of De Gaulle and others that the U.S. could not be depended upon to meet threats even farther from our shores? Failure to consult could also weaken their support; yet consultation, with the inevitable leaks, disagreements and delays, could weaken our action. The situation appeared even worse in Latin America, where nonintervention by the U.S. was a religion but a failure to intervene would bring a Castro-Communist trend.

The President asked Rusk to prepare an analysis of possible Allied reactions; and the Secretary summarized it for our Wednesday afternoon meeting in his department. He emphasized that our evidence and
reasoning would have to be convincing, and that our response would have to offer the Soviets a way out, but that the above problems would still remain. When he concluded, I asked, “Are you saying in effect that if we take a strong action the Allies and Latin Americans will turn against us and if we take a weak action they will turn away from us?” “That’s about it,” replied Rusk. There was a moment of gloomy silence until General Taylor interjected: “And a Merry Christmas to you, too!”

The bulk of our time Tuesday through Friday was spent in George Ball’s conference room canvassing all the possible courses as the President had requested, and preparing the back-up material for them: suggested time schedules or scenarios, draft messages, military estimates and predictions of Soviet and Cuban responses. Initially the possibilities seemed to divide into six categories, some of which could be combined:

1. Do nothing.

2. Bring diplomatic pressures and warnings to bear upon the Soviets. Possible forms included an appeal to the UN or OAS for an inspection team, or a direct approach to Khrushchev, possibly at a summit conference. The removal of our missile bases in Turkey in exchange for the removal of the Cuban missiles was also listed in our later discussions as a possibility which Khrushchev was likely to suggest if we didn’t.

3. Undertake a secret approach to Castro, to use this means of splitting him off from the Soviets, to warn him that the alternative was his island’s downfall and that the Soviets were selling him out.

4. Initiate indirect military action by means of a blockade, possibly accompanied by increased aerial surveillance and warnings. Many types of blockades were considered.

5. Conduct an air strike—pinpointed against the missiles only or against other military targets, with or without advance warning. (Other military means of directly removing the missiles were raised—bombarding them with pellets that would cause their malfunctioning without fatalities, or suddenly landing paratroopers or guerrillas—but none of these was deemed feasible.)

6. Launch an invasion—or, as one chief advocate of this course put it: “Go in there and take Cuba away from Castro.”

Other related moves were considered—such as declaring a national emergency, sending a special envoy to Khrushchev or asking Congress for a declaration of war against Cuba (suggested as a means of building both Allied support and a legal basis for blockade, but deemed not essential to either). But these six choices were the center of our deliberations.

Choice No. 1—doing nothing—and choice No. 2—limiting our response to diplomatic action only—were both seriously considered. As some (but not all) Pentagon advisers pointed out to the President, we
had long lived within range of Soviet missiles, we expected Khrushchev to live with our missiles nearby, and by taking this addition calmly we could prevent him from inflating its importance. All the other courses raised so many risks and drawbacks that choice No. 2 had its appeal. All of us came back to it at one discouraged moment or another; and it was advocated to the President as a preferable alternative to blockade by one of the regular members of our group in the key Thursday night meeting discussed below.

But the President had rejected this course from the outset. He was concerned less about the missiles’ military implications than with their effect on the global political balance. The Soviet move had been undertaken so swiftly, so secretly and with so much deliberate deception—it was so sudden a departure from Soviet practice—that it represented a provocative change in the delicate status quo. Missiles on Soviet territory or submarines were very different from missiles in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in their political and psychological effect on Latin America. The history of Soviet intentions toward smaller nations was very different from our own. Such a step, if accepted, would be followed by more; and the President’s September pledges of action clearly called this step unacceptable. While he desired to combine diplomatic moves with military action, he was not willing to let the UN debate and Khrushchev equivocate while the missiles became operational.