The Kennedy Half-Century (22 page)

“The length, sir.”

“The what? The length?”

“The length of it. Yes.”

Lundahl then introduced Sidney Graybeal (“our missile man”) who showed the president pictures of “similar weapons systems taken during Soviet military parades.”

“Is this ready to be fired?” asked Kennedy.

“No, sir,” answered Graybeal.

Actually, no one knew for sure whether any missiles were operational. Bundy wondered if there weren’t other sites on the island that might be more advanced, since the U-2 had photographed only a small portion of western Cuba. Kennedy immediately ordered additional reconnaissance flights to get as much good information as possible before he made any decisions. At the moment, though, Kennedy wondered how he could avoid launching an attack, even if only a surgical air strike against the missile sites. He asked his advisers to weigh in on Khrushchev’s game plan. General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seconded the president’s suggestion that the Soviets might be trying to compensate for a perceived American advantage in the nuclear balance of terror. Shortrange missiles in Cuba were a cheap, effective way to deliver a heavy payload against U.S. targets. Secretary of State Dean Rusk added that Khrushchev could also be trying to use Cuba as a bargaining chip for Berlin. If the United States launched a preemptive strike against Castro, the Soviet chairman would have an excuse to send tanks into West Berlin. Kennedy listened to the chatter a while longer, then told the group to reconvene at 6:30 P.M., commanding in the meantime that everyone should leak nothing and project an air of normality.
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That night, Taylor told the president that surgical airstrikes might not be able to eliminate all of the missile sites. Secretary McNamara suggested a naval blockade instead of pinpoint attacks. At first Kennedy did not like the idea, in part because of his disagreement with McNamara over the situation’s overall strategic importance. The secretary of defense remained skeptical that Russian missiles in Cuba would be enough to topple America’s nuclear advantage; JFK was more concerned with Khrushchev’s newfound diplomatic clout. Once the weapons were operational, the president reasoned, the Communists could ride roughshod over Latin America’s fragile democracies and maybe even blackmail the United States into making concessions on Berlin. In addition, an unchecked military buildup in Cuba would strengthen Castro.
But what was the appropriate response? No one could say for sure, and the president ended the meeting having more questions than answers.
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The next day, Kennedy tried to maintain the appearance of normality by following his preset schedule. He met with the West German foreign secretary at ten A.M. and attended a luncheon at the Libyan embassy. On the way to the luncheon, he ordered his driver to stop at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. “We’re going in here to say a prayer,” he told an aide. “Right now we need all the prayers we can get.” That afternoon, he flew to Connecticut to campaign for Abraham Ribicoff, the former secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare who was running for a Senate seat. Meanwhile, the president’s advisers were huddled in near-constant meetings. By this time, U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson and former secretary of state Dean Acheson had joined the discussion. Stevenson wanted the president to exhaust the diplomatic route before unleashing the military; Acheson, on the other hand, thought that the United States would lose face if it didn’t respond forcefully. Curtis LeMay, the hawkish Air Force chief of staff and architect of the incendiary air raids against Japanese cities during World War II, agreed with Acheson and began drafting plans for air sorties against Cuba.
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A day later, Ex Comm received new intelligence showing the installation of intermediate-range missiles in Cuba that could reach eastern and southern sections of the United States. Dean Rusk worried about Russian missile bases popping “out like measles all over the world.” Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs now recommended a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Undersecretary of State George Ball and Robert McNamara discussed the consequences of a military response, and their conversation indicates an unannounced strike, which would have increased the odds of taking out all of the missile sites, was still under consideration. “If there is a strike without a preliminary discussion with Khrushchev, how many Soviet citizens [manning the sites] will be killed, I don’t know, there could be several hundred, perhaps at a minimum,” the secretary of defense mused. “We’re using napalm, 750-pound bombs … This is an extensive strike we’re talking about.” And then how would Khrushchev respond? “It seems to me,” Ball added, “it just must be a strong response and I think we should expect that. And therefore the question really is, ‘Are we willing to pay some kind of a rather substantial price to eliminate these missiles?’ I think the price is going to be high. It may still be worth paying to eliminate the missiles, but I think we must assume that it’s going to be high.” The president agreed that America “needed to take some action,” but nothing that would trigger a “nuclear exchange” with Russia, a scenario he described as “the final failure.” Kennedy returned to the idea of a blockade: Would it require a declaration of war? And what should the United States do about the missiles that were already in Cuba?
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Later that day, again in an effort to project nonchalance, Kennedy kept a prearranged appointment with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko to discuss the Berlin question. Gromyko had no idea that Kennedy knew about the missiles, and the president kept his cards hidden. The Soviet minister said that Castro was worried about an American invasion and claimed that the USSR had supplied him with weapons for defensive purposes only; poker-faced and baldly lying, Gromyko promised that no offensive weapons had been or would be introduced into Cuba. The president responded by reading an excerpt from his September 13 speech, which warned the Soviets against arming Cuba with offensive weapons. The inscrutable Gromyko sat in stony silence. After the meeting, Kennedy told Robert Lovett, a former secretary of defense during the Truman administration, that he had been sorely tempted to show the Russian the photographs of the missiles sitting in his desk drawer.
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That evening, the blockade option gained traction. Most of the Ex Comm members now favored it, and Kennedy liked the idea of taking a gradual first step, one that would give Khrushchev time to back down. As a result, the president ordered the military to begin working on the blockade specifics, while retaining a backup plan for outright invasion of Cuba. The next morning, he held a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, who were still pressing for a fullblown attack. “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,” said Curtis LeMay, “and I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
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LeMay’s blunt comment annoyed Kennedy. “What did you say?” he asked. When LeMay repeated it, the president chuckled and said, “You’re in there with me.”
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Weary of the vacillation and bickering among his advisers, JFK instructed his brother Bobby and Ted Sorensen to work toward a consensus; he wanted to make a final decision over the weekend but was leaving on a brief campaign trip to Illinois. In the president’s absence, the members of Ex Comm assembled an acceptable compromise, one that combined a blockade with plans for air strikes. Fabricating a head cold to the press, JFK cut short the campaign stumping and came back to the White House on Saturday to hear a new idea pushed by Adlai Stevenson: Why not swap Guantánamo and the NATO missiles in Turkey and Italy for the missiles in Cuba? Kennedy politely declined to engage in such high-stakes horse trading. The United States, insisted the president, could not reward the Soviets for their duplicitous behavior. Then the president was presented with two final options: He could authorize an air strike, which would likely lead to a general invasion of Cuba, or he could start the confrontation with a naval blockade of the island nation and progress from there as needed. Roswell Gilpatric, deputy secretary of
defense, helped nudge Kennedy toward the safer choice: “Essentially, Mr. President, this is a choice between limited action and unlimited action, and most of us think that it’s better to start with limited action.” The president agreed.
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It was finally time to go public, to let America and the world know of the extreme danger existing at the moment. On Monday, October 22, 1962, a cryptic announcement from Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary, had alerted the country that the president would deliver a nationally televised address at seven o’clock that evening concerning a matter of the “highest national urgency.” At the appointed hour, Americans huddled around their radios and television sets.

“Good evening, my fellow citizens,” Kennedy began. “This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” After explaining the danger posed to U.S., Canadian, and Latin American cities, the president accused the Soviets of promulgating lies. In September they had said that the weapons in Cuba were for defensive purposes only and the USSR never deployed ground-to-ground missiles to other countries. He also mentioned his meeting with Gromyko. Next, the president explained why missiles in Cuba mattered: “We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” And rather than accept that threat, he said, the United States would begin a “quarantine” of Cuba; the word “blockade” was not employed since it had graver diplomatic implications. In addition, the military was placed on heightened alert, the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was reinforced, and the United Nations was asked to pressure the USSR. Kennedy called upon Khrushchev “to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations,” noting that the United States would regard a nuclear attack from Cuban territory on any country in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by Russia itself, which would trigger “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” The president also declared that he was prepared to check any aggressive action by the Soviets “anywhere in the world,” especially West Berlin. “Our goal is not the victory of might,” he concluded, “but the vindication of right—not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom,
here in this hemisphere and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.”
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Bobby Kennedy later remembered the mood in the White House after the president’s speech: “We went to bed that night filled with concern and trepidation, but filled also with a sense of pride in the strength, the purposefulness, and the courage of the president of the United States.” While he hoped otherwise, JFK feared his speech might prompt an immediate Soviet military response. When Tuesday morning dawned and the world was still intact, the president and his advisers exhaled slightly. So did the American people. A Gallup poll taken after the speech showed that 84 percent of the respondents supported the quarantine, even though one in five thought that it would lead to World War III. Tens of thousands of telegrams poured into the White House favoring the president’s position by a ten-to-one ratio. Americans were speaking nearly with one voice, and it demanded the removal of the missiles in Cuba.
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The quarantine went into effect at 10:00 A.M. on Wednesday, October 24, 1962. By then, sixty-three ships, including a number of Latin American vessels, were patrolling the waters around Cuba.
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Scores of other ships, airplanes, and troops were on standby, awaiting orders from the president to attack. A few minutes after ten o’clock, McNamara relayed a message from the Navy—two Soviet ships, the
Kimovsk
and the
Yuri Gagarin
, were maintaining a steady course toward Cuba and would reach the quarantine line in roughly two hours. Immediately afterward, word came that a Russian sub had been spotted between the two vessels. The Pentagon ordered Strategic Air Command to prepare for a nuclear war. Potentially millions of people would die if the Russian ships failed to turn around. The intense stress pushed the president almost to the breaking point. He and his brother Robert stared at each other, wondering if their decision had doomed the planet. Bobby reported experiencing morbid flashbacks to the demise of his brother Joe, Jack’s brush with death, and Jackie’s miscarriages. People in the room were talking, but he said he couldn’t hear what they were saying.
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At 10:25 A.M. CIA director John McCone broke the tension by reporting that several of the inbound Soviets vessels had stopped short of the quarantine line. Word came a few minutes later that additional ships were returning to Russia. “We’re eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked,” whispered Dean Rusk. Actually, unbeknownst to the White House, Khrushchev had ordered his vessels to turn back more than a full day earlier, and they were farther from the quarantine line than U.S. reports suggested. Still, Rusk was right—the Soviets had blinked; for the first time since the crisis began, events were moving away from war.
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