Kennedy (127 page)

The President also went to bed early, having had no rest after lunch and only a brief swim before. Many marveled that he swam or slept at all. But throughout both the previous week and the week that followed, he had adhered to as normal a life as possible, working nights with no sense of hours, requesting the postponement of minor matters, never taking his mind off the Cuban missiles, but still eating with his family, meeting with unknowing foreign leaders and staff aides, presenting an aviation trophy, and dining the night after his speech with the Ormsby-Gores and other guests as a substitute for a previously planned
gala party. “His calmness…[and] unfailing good humor,” said the British Ambassador, were “extraordinary to behold [and] kept everybody else calm and in a good mood.” The telephone interrupted him constantly during that dinner, but he always returned immediately to the lighter conversations he had begun before the interruption. His wife saw more of him during the crisis than usual, as he sought her company at meals normally devoted to business and on walks around the South Lawn.

Similarly, in our meetings and in his office during those two weeks he was calm and deliberate, his mind clear, his emotions controlled, never brooding, always in command. He retained that composure even when fatigue was overtaking us all. After one meeting during the second week he expressed concern to me that one official had overworked himself to the point of mental and physical exhaustion.

The Presidency was never lonelier than when faced with its first nuclear confrontation. John Kennedy never lost sight of what either war or surrender would do to the whole human race. His UN mission was preparing for a negotiated peace and his Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing for war, and he intended to keep both on rein. He was determined, despite divided counsel and conflicting pressures, to take all necessary action and no unnecessary action. He could not afford to be hasty or hesitant, reckless or afraid. The odds that the Soviets would go all the way to war, he later said, seemed to him then “somewhere between one out of three and even.” He spoke on the back porch on that Saturday before his speech not of his possible death but of all the innocent children of the world who had never had a chance or a voice. While at times he interjected humor into our discussions, his mood can. best be illustrated by the doodles he scratched on two sheets of his yellow legal pad during one of our meetings shortly after his speech:

The Alliance held. Macmillan phoned his support, although expressing his interest in a summit talk on disarmament and an interim suspension of activity on both sides. Adenauer, Brandt and the people of West Berlin did not flinch or complain. Despite some wavering by Canada, the NATO Council and De Gaulle pledged their backing after Acheson’s briefings, attaching neither reservations nor complaints on grounds of no advance consultation, and ignoring the pickets and protests flooding London and
other capitals. The British press, even more than that of the French and some neutrals, was largely negative. Some questioned whether missiles were really there, and at the suggestion of Ambassador Ormsby-Gore, with whom he reviewed the pictures after Tuesday’s dinner, the President released the best photographs of the evidence. Pacifist complaints, interestingly enough, were all directed at the American quarantine, with no word about the Soviet missile deception. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, wired Kennedy: “Your action desperate…no conceivable justification,” while wiring Khrushchev: “Your continued forbearance is our great hope.”

But of far greater importance to Kennedy than Lord Russell was the action taken by the twenty members of the OAS in immediately and unanimously adopting a broad authorizing resolution. The President, who had been concerned about getting the necessary two-thirds vote to back his quarantine, warmly congratulated Rusk and Martin. Martin, in fact, had been one of his most thoughtful and steady advisers all week. So had Llewellyn Thompson, who along with Martin had emphasized the fundamental importance of obtaining OAS endorsement of the quarantine. Martin’s concern was Latin America’s inevitable resentment of any unilateral U.S. action. Thompson’s interest was the added legal justification such endorsement would give to the quarantine under international and maritime law as well as the UN Charter. That was important, he said, not only to our maritime allies but to legalistic-minded decision-makers in the Kremlin.

In the UN, in Washington and in the foreign embassies, support for the U.S. position was surprisingly strong. This was due in part to the shock of Soviet perfidy, and their futile attempts to deny the photographic evidence of attempted nuclear blackmail. It was due in part to world-wide recognition that this was an East-West nuclear confrontation, not a U.S. quarrel with Cuba. It was due in part to the President’s choice of a low level of force at the outset and to his forceful but restrained approach. It was due, finally, to the excellent presentations made in the UN by Ambassador Stevenson, with Schlesinger as an emergency aide and John McCloy to lend bipartisan stature.

At 4
P.M
. Tuesday, October 23, and again on Thursday, October 25, flanked by photo interpreters and intelligence analysts, Stevenson made a forceful presentation to the UN Security Council. Zorin had charged that the CIA had manufactured the evidence. Then let a UN team inspect the sites, said Stevenson.

Still another kind of support was essential—and forthcoming. Some Americans sought to flee, to hide or to resupply their fallout shelters. The stock market dropped. But by a ratio of ten to one the telegrams received at the White House expressed confidence and support. Reminded that the public mail response in the 1958 Formosa crisis had been against risking military action, Kennedy offered no comment. But he must have inwardly taken some satisfaction with his labors over the previous two years to prepare the American people to face the facts. He mentioned only two telegrams to me, both sarcastically. One came from a right-wing leader who had long urged a tougher policy toward the insignificant Castro but now quaked at the prospects of our confronting a nuclear power. The other came from Mississippi’s Governor Barnett, who “retracted” an earlier wire complaining about our military might being used in Mississippi instead of the Caribbean.

Later in the week the House Republican Campaign Committee would charge that the whole Kennedy approach appeared “brazenly false” and ineffective. Still later some would maintain that the whole crisis had been politically timed and inspired. But on Tuesday the GOP Congressional leaders, echoed by Senator Keating, called for complete support of the President.

“We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere,” young Jack Kennedy had prophetically written twenty-two years earlier in
Why England Slept
, “unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments are prepared to back up the command, even to the ultimate point of going to war.” On Tuesday, October 23, 1962, the people appeared prepared—and so did the armaments. During his twenty-one months in the White House he had, among other moves, increased the number of combat-ready divisions from eleven to fifteen, increased airlift and tactical air support, accelerated the Polaris schedule to place nine instead of three missile submarines (each with sixteen missiles aboard) on active station, and increased the military personnel, fleet readiness and vessel numbers of the U.S. Navy. All these increases were now poised for action.

His attention was focused on the Navy as never before. The “quarantine” was a new form of reprisal under international law, an act of
national and collective self-defense against an act of aggression under the UN and OAS charters and under the Rio Treaty of 1947. Its legality, much strengthened by the OAS endorsement, had been carefully worked out. A “Proclamation of Interdiction of the Delivery of Offensive Weapons to Cuba” was discussed in our two Executive Committee meetings on the first day after the President’s speech—at 10
A.M
. and 6
P.M
. Tuesday—and it was then immediately issued, effective the next day. The proclamation stressed that

Behind this “disable, don’t sink” order, its graduated timing, its exclusion for the time being of POL (which automatically let all tankers pass) and the President’s personal direction of the quarantine’s operation, was his determination not to let needless incidents or reckless subordinates escalate so dangerous and delicate a crisis beyond control. He had learned at the Bay of Pigs that the momentum of events and enthusiasts could take issues of peace and war out of his own hands. Naval communications permitted this operation, unlike the Bay of Pigs situation, to be run directly out of his office and the Pentagon. During his first week as President, he recalled, exiles had seized a Portuguese passenger ship in the South Atlantic which the U.S. agreed to find. The President, surprised at the time it took the Navy to locate the liner, had accepted the answer offered: “It’s a big ocean.” In October, 1962, it still was—and the quarantine was no automatic solution, even with a line of 16 destroyers, 3 cruisers, an antisubmarine aircraft carrier and 6 utility ships, with nearly 150 others in reserve.

Other issues were discussed in the two Tuesday meetings of the Executive Committee: what to do if a U-2 were shot down, how to keep the press and Congress informed, preparations at Berlin, preparations to invade, cancellation of the President’s fall trip to Brazil and defense of the Southeastern states against a sudden air attack. Civil defense authorities in that region were alerted and planes were dispersed, the President persisting that he had earlier seen them lined up wing to wing, an easy target, on a flight to Palm Beach. (When reassured once again that these fears were unfounded, he ordered aerial photographs taken without the knowledge of the Florida bases and found, to the discomfort of the military, that our aircraft were still highly concentrated.) Under that fall’s Congressional authorization, military tours of duty were extended. For the first time low-level reconnaissance flights were ordered
over Cuba, flying in just over the treetops below the range of the Soviet SAMs. These pictures showed in remarkable detail more Soviet military personnel and weapons than anticipated, all Cubans excluded from missile areas and two deadly MRBMs ready to operate.

The big question was the big ocean. To us, Khrushchev appeared—in a harsh but rambling Soviet Government statement Tuesday morning rejecting the quarantine as “piracy,” in two private letters to Kennedy Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening (both answered within hours after their receipt with firm restatements of our position) and in his answers to appeals from Bertrand Russell and Acting Secretary General U Thant—to have been caught off balance, to be maneuvering, to be seeking a consensus among the top Kremlin rulers, uncertain whether to admit that the missiles were there in view of the widespread denunciations of that action. The Soviets, it seemed, had counted on surprising us, on disunity in the West and on a sufficient fear of war in the United States to prevent any military response. Having proven them wrong on those counts, we wondered whether their inconsistent positions reflected a possible internal struggle. We joked around the Cabinet table about Khrushchev’s apparently yielding to his hard-liners one day and his peace advocates the next, and about the fact that—because of the time differential and slowness of transmission—we worked all day to send messages they would receive upon waking up and they did exactly the same.

But the eighteen Soviet dry cargo ships still heading toward the quarantine were no joke. Five of these ships with large hatches were being watched with special care. The Executive Committee, in session most of each day, soon knew every Soviet ship by name and which of them were suspected of carrying armaments. Tuesday night, as the ships came on, the tension built. Robert Kennedy was dispatched that night to find out from the Soviet Ambassador whether any instructions had been issued to the Soviet ship captains. He learned nothing. “You fellows who thought the blockade was the most peaceful answer may find out differently pretty soon,” said the President. At our Wednesday morning meeting, held just as the quarantine went into effect, some half-dozen Soviet submarines were reported to have joined these ships. Orders were prepared to sink any subs interfering with the quarantine. In the midst of the same meeting, more news arrived. The Soviet ships nearest Cuba had apparently stopped or altered their course. A feeling of relief went round the table.

The prospects of confrontation at sea were not, however, by any means over. Soviet intentions were not yet clear. The quarantine had not yet been tested. Kennedy told U Thant, in response to the Secretary General’s initial appeal, that the blockade could not be suspended, that “the existing threat was created by the secret introduction of offensive
weapons into Cuba, and the answer lies in their removal of such weapons.” (A second U Thant proposal on Friday, negotiated through Stevenson, urging both sides to avoid unnecessary contact during the next few days, was more acceptable, Kennedy simply stating the obvious—that there would be no incidents if Soviet ships stayed away.) Khrushchev summoned a visiting American businessman to tell him that Kennedy should agree to a summit, that conflict in the Caribbean could lead to nuclear war (including the use of the offensive missiles he now admitted were in Cuba) and that Soviet submarines would sink any American vessel forcing a Soviet ship to stop.