Kennedy (129 page)

The President would not, in my judgment, have moved immediately
to either an air strike or an invasion; but the pressures for such a move on the following Tuesday were rapidly and irresistibly growing, strongly supported by a minority in our group and increasingly necessitated by a deterioration in the situation. The downing of our plane could not be ignored. Neither could the approaching ship, or the continuing work on the missile sites, or the Soviet SAMs. We stayed in session all day Saturday, and finally, shortly after 8.
P.M
., noting rising tempers and irritability, the President recessed the meeting for a one-hour dinner break. Pressure and fatigue, he later noted privately, might have broken the group’s steady demeanor in another twenty-four or forty-eight hours. At dinner in the White House staff “mess,” the Vice President, Treasury Secretary Dillon and I talked of entirely different subjects. The meeting at 9
P.M
. was shorter, cooler and quieter; and with the knowledge that our meeting the next morning at 10
A.M
. could be decisive—one way or the other—we adjourned for the night.

Upon awakening Sunday morning, October 28, I turned on the news on my bedside radio, as I had each morning during the week. In the course of the 9
A.M
. newscast a special bulletin came in from Moscow. It was a new letter from Khrushchev, his fifth since Tuesday, sent publicly in the interest of speed. Kennedy’s terms were being accepted. The missiles were being withdrawn. Inspection would be permitted. The confrontation was over.

Hardly able to believe it, I reached Bundy at the White House. It was true. He had just called the President, who took the news with “tremendous satisfaction” and asked to see the message on his way to Mass. Our meeting was postponed from 10 to 11
A.M
. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in Washington in every way.

With deep feelings of relief and exhilaration, we gathered in the Cabinet-Room at eleven, our thirteenth consecutive day of close collaboration. Just as missiles are incomparably faster than all their predecessors, so this world-wide crisis had ended incredibly faster than all its predecessors. The talk preceding the meeting was boisterous. “What is Castro saying now?” chortled someone. Robert McNamara said he had risen early that morning to draw up a list of “steps to take short of invasion.” When he heard the news, said John McCone, “I could hardly believe my ears.” Waiting for the President to come in, we speculated about what would have happened

• if Kennedy had chosen the air strike over the blockade…

• if the OAS and other Allies had not supported us…

• if both our conventional and our nuclear forces had not been strengthened over the past twenty-one months…

• if it were not for the combined genius and courage that produced U-2 photographs and their interpretations…

• if a blockade had been instituted before we could prove Soviet duplicity and offensive weapons…

• if Kennedy and Khrushchev had not been accustomed to communicating directly with each other and had not left that channel open…

• if the President’s speech of October 22 had not taken Khrushchev by surprise…

• if John F. Kennedy had not been President of the United States.

John F. Kennedy entered and we all stood up. He had, as Harold Macmillan would later say, earned his place in history by this one act alone. He had been engaged in a personal as well as national contest for world leadership and he had won. He had reassured those nations fearing we would use too much strength and those fearing we would use none at all. Cuba had been the site of his greatest failure and now of his greatest success. The hard lessons of the first Cuban crisis were applied in his steady handling of the second with a carefully measured combination of defense, diplomacy and dialogue. Yet he walked in and began the meeting without a trace of excitement or even exultation.

Earlier in his office—told by Bundy and Kaysen that his simultaneous plea to India and Pakistan to resolve their differences over Kashmir in view of the Chinese attack would surely be heeded, now that he looked “ten feet tall”—he had evenly replied: “That will wear off in about a week, and everyone will be back to thinking only of their own interests.”

Displaying the same caution and precision with which he had determined for thirteen days exactly how much pressure to apply, he quickly and quietly organized the machinery to work for a UN inspection and reconnaissance effort. He called off the Sunday overflights and ordered the Navy to avoid halting any ships on that day. (The one ship previously approaching had stopped.) He asked that precautions be taken to prevent Cuban exile units from upsetting the agreement through one of their publicity-seeking raids. He laid down the line we were all to follow—no boasting, no gloating, not even a claim of victory. We had won by enabling Khrushchev to avoid complete humiliation—we should not humiliate him now. If Khrushchev wanted to boast that he had won a major concession and proved his peaceful manner, that was the loser’s prerogative. Major problems of implementing the agreement still faced us. Other danger spots in the world remained. Soviet treachery was too fresh in our memory to relax our vigil now.

Rejecting the temptation of a dramatic TV appearance, he issued
a brief three-paragraph statement welcoming Khrushchev’s “statesmanlike decision…an important and constructive contribution to peace.” Then the President’s fourth letter of the week—a conciliatory reply to the Chairman’s “firm undertakings”—was drafted, discussed, approved and sent on the basis of the wire service copy of the Chairman’s letter, the official text having not yet arrived through diplomatic channels.

Weeks later the President would present to each of us a little silver calendar of October, 1962, mounted on walnut, with the thirteen days of October 16 through October 28 as extra deeply engraved as they already were in our memories. But on that Sunday noon, concealing the enormous sense of relief and fatigue which swept over him, he merely thanked us briefly, called another meeting for Monday morning and rejoined his family as he had each night of the crisis.

I went down the hall to where my secretary, Gloria Sitrin, was at work as she had been day and night for almost two weeks. From her bookcase I picked up a copy of
Profiles in Courage
and read to her a part of the introductory quotation John Kennedy had selected from Burke’s eulogy of Charles James Fox: “He may live long, he may do much. But here is the summit. He never can exceed what he does this day.”

T
HE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
, Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons shortly after it ended, represented “one of the great turning points in history.” The autumn of 1962, said President Kennedy, if not a turning point, was at least “a climactic period…even though its effects can’t be fully perceived now…. Future historians looking back at 1962 may well mark this year as the time when the tide…began [to turn].”

Time will tell whether subsequent events—in Peking, Moscow, Dallas and elsewhere—have altered or will yet alter the accuracy of those prophecies. But in 1962-1963 little time elapsed before the impact of that crisis was affecting Soviet-American relations, Soviet-Chinese relations, the Western Alliance, domestic American politics and Castro’s Cuba itself.

The first task was to make certain all Soviet offensive weapons left Cuba. One high official warned the day after Khrushchev’s letter of retreat that it might have been a fake while work continued on the missiles. Somewhat more attention was paid by the President to a letter he received from Dean Acheson which praised in superlative terms Kennedy’s handling of the crisis but warned, out of his experience with Korea, that national exultation could turn to national frustration as Communist negotiators wrangled on and on. Kennedy continued our aerial reconnaissance in the absence of the UN’s ability to mount a substitute, and
provided formal notice to the Soviets of his action. He continued the daily, sometimes twice daily, meetings of the Executive Committee—continued the high state of readiness of American military forces in the Caribbean and elsewhere—and continued to supervise personally all releases to the press and all details of the prolonged discussions carried on at the UN by his team of negotiators. (Their views did not always reflect his caution after the earlier Soviet duplicity or his concern for Congressional relations; and he remarked to them only half in jest after one of many long sessions that “we seem to be spending as much time negotiating with you as you are negotiating with the Soviets.”)

The Soviet negotiators, fearful that taunts from Red China would impair their standing in the eyes of other non-European Communists, were concerned with their relations with Cuba. Fidel Castro—who had earlier snarled that “whoever tries to inspect Cuba must come in battle array”—was stunned by Khrushchev’s reversal, to which he obviously had not consented. He adamantly insisted on five new conditions of his own, and harangued and harassed the UN’s U Thant when the Secretary General arrived to work out details. The baffled U Thant returned to New York, and the Soviet Union’s Mikoyan flew down for similar treatment. Castro complained to him that Cuba had been betrayed, tried to give the impression that the Chinese were moving in, argued fruitlessly with him for a week, totally ignored him for ten days, and finally resumed discussions only when Mikoyan prepared to fly back to Moscow. Castro, the Armenian was reported to have said, is like a mule—hard to convince and hard to deal with.

Meanwhile, regardless of Castro’s wishes, the missile bases were dismantled by Soviet technicians. The sites were destroyed and plowed over. The missiles and other equipment were crated for return to the Soviet Union. Inasmuch as Castro continued to prohibit any on-site inspection, the crates were counted and inspected by American air and sea forces in the Caribbean, and the Soviet ships transporting them were followed all the way back to their home ports.

Khrushchev at first balked at also removing the IL-28 bombers. They were too limited in range to pose much of a threat to the United States. Some of Kennedy’s advisers also suggested that he let the matter drop. But Kennedy (though wondering at times whether his stand was necessary) felt he had to insist on his original vow against all offensive weapons systems, rejected a variety of Khrushchev conditions, kept the quarantine ships on station and finally announced that he would hold a news conference on November 20 to discuss future steps. Setting the hour at 6
P.M
. helped signal the seriousness of his intended statement. On November 19 he prepared letters to Macmillan, Adenauer and De Gaulle, warning them that the crisis was about to
heat up again, and that air strikes and extensions of the blockade were being considered. On November 19 and 20 we worked on an opening statement which would sternly insist that the IL-28’s must go and call a new OAS Organ of Consultation meeting that week. On Wednesday afternoon, November 20, a few hours before the news conference was to begin, a new letter from Khrushchev arrived. The IL-28’s would be withdrawn in thirty days under full inspection, and Soviet combat units (identified a few days earlier) would be withdrawn “in due course.” A few hours later the President announced to the press not the calling of an OAS council but the end of the quarantine. November 22, 1962, became a Thanksgiving, in his words, with “much for which we can be grateful, as we look back to where we stood only four weeks ago.”

From that date on the problem of a Soviet offensive military base in Cuba gradually and somewhat fitfully subsided. The President, at his news conference, had announced that the permanent withdrawal of all offensive weapons and the absence of any Cuban aggression would mean “peace in the Caribbean.” The Soviets regarded this as an insufficient fulfillment of the no-invasion pledge, particularly when the President accompanied it by a statement that our battle against Cuban subversion and our hopes for Cuban liberation would both continue. Nor did they like his announcement that our aerial surveillance of the island, a humiliating violation of Cuban air space, would continue, with a clear indication that any fulfillment of Castro’s threat to fire on such planes would be returned with whatever force was required. But the President insisted that Castro’s blocking of on-site inspection and controls not only required such flights but represented a Soviet failure to make good their side of the bargain. After exasperating weeks of haggling over how to wrap the crisis up officially in the UN, it silently sank into limbo.