The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (118 page)

Bobby took a seat across from the president at the Ex Comm meeting and looked into his brother’s drawn face, with “his eyes pained, almost gray.” The burden of this moment was like a physical pressure bearing down on
him, “the danger and concern … like a cloud over us all and particularly over the president.”

There was no button Kennedy could press, no gauge he could read to tell whether the situation was about to explode, and every moment there seemed new uncertainties, new elements. Now there were Russian submarines running deep near the Russian freighters closing toward the line of blockade.

“Here is the exact situation,” McNamara said. “We have depth charges that have such a small charge that they can be dropped and they can actually hit the submarine, without damaging the submarine. Practice depth charges. We propose to use those as warning depth charges.”

Kennedy was a navy man and knew that the admirals’ most exquisitely conceived plans often became nothing more than inane doodles once combat began. The president had, if anything, too accurate an imagination about all the possibilities of this moment. And as he sat there, Bobby saw him put his hand up to his face, cover his mouth, and close his fist. That was not his brother as he had ever seen him, and for a moment he worried not about war but about Jack.

This room was full of powerful, intense men speaking ponderous words, but for a moment the brothers stared at each other and Bobby had the sense that “for a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the president.” As Bobby looked at his brother he recalled later that his mind flashed back to so much that had gone on in the family. Their father had taught his sons to see a pinprick of blue in the blackest sky, but he thought now only of the darkest of times. He thought of how Jack had been ill. He thought of the day at Hyannis Port when they learned of Joe Jr.’s death. He thought of the day Jackie lost a child, when he had been there and his brother had not. He thought “of personal times of strain and hurt,” the memories flashing by with such intensity that he heard not a word of the discussion going on around him.

Out of this miasma of memories, Bobby heard his brother’s voice. “If he doesn’t surface or if he takes some action—takes some action to assist the merchant ship, are we just going to attack him anyway?” the president asked about a Russian submarine shadowing the Soviet freighters. “At what point are we going to attack him?”

Kennedy did not even wait for his military leaders to give their strong response. “I think we ought to wait on that today. We don’t want to have the first thing we attack [be] a Soviet submarine. I’d much rather have a merchant ship.”

John McCone came into the room a few minutes later after gathering the latest intelligence on the Russian ships approaching the imaginary barricade
that the Americans had drawn in the Atlantic Ocean. “Well, what do they say they’re doing with those, John?” Kennedy asked.

“Well, they either stopped them or reversed direction,” McCone responded.

In that room there were no audible sighs, no backslapping, and no self-congratulations. “The meeting droned on,” Bobby recalled. “But everyone looked like a different person. For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.”

T
he threat of an immediate confrontation on the high seas was over, but the missiles of October remained in place. For Kennedy, the weight of his burden did not lessen, for U-2 photos clearly showed how quickly the missile sites were being built and the IL-28 bombers uncrated and prepared for flight. The longer the president negotiated, the greater the possibility that the missiles would be combat-ready and Khrushchev would walk with a bold new strut.

The next afternoon, Thursday, October 25, Kennedy walked in on a scene of Jackie photographing Caroline while Robin Douglas-Home carved an enormous Halloween pumpkin. His wife had just finished being filmed for an NBC special on Washington’s new National Cultural Center. Although the Kennedys were often called American royalty, a coinage so antithetical to American traditions, there was one way in which they exemplified the finest aspects of noble blood. That was the way they let nothing, no personal unhappiness, no private pain, and no public problem, affect their performance of public rituals. By now Jackie knew why her husband had asked her and the children to return from their weekend home. He wanted her with him through this crisis, and he wanted the world to think that life was going on normally at the White House. She had not canceled the television interview today, despite the political drama and the fact that John Jr. was in bed with a 104-degree fever.

Douglas-Home stayed for dinner that evening. This was not a mannered social function but a casual meal. “For God’s sake, don’t mention Cuba to him,” Jackie admonished her guest. Kennedy was involved in the greatest crisis of his presidency, and yet even now at this moment he was fascinated by gossip and trivia, all the flotsam of popular culture and modern society. He sat puffing on a cigar, the evening interrupted by any number of serious phone calls about Cuba. Listening to him through most of this evening, though, was like paging through a wondrously eclectic magazine. Here was an adroit essay on how Lord Beaverbrook ran his newspaper empire. And an ironic, insightful article on Frank Sinatra’s way with women. Then an aside
on the infamous photo of a model sucking her thumb while lying on a bearskin rug that ran in
Queen,
the British magazine. Nothing seemed too trivial or too bizarre for Kennedy this evening as he segued from subject to subject that had nothing in common except his curiosity about them.

E
ven at the worst of the crisis, Lansdale continued to push the covert role of Operation Mongoose. “Lansdale feels badly cut out of the picture and appears to be seeking to reconstitute the Mongoose Special Group operations during this period of impending crisis,” the CIA’s deputy director wrote his superior, McCone, on October 25. The next day at a Mongoose meeting, at which Bobby was present, McCone “stated that he understood the Mongoose goal was to encourage the Cuban people to take Cuba away from Castro” and that the CIA “would continue to support Lansdale.”

The president seemed almost equally unwilling to face up to the melancholy reality that he might have to promise to live with Castro’s Cuba. When Kennedy talked to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan about the possibility of guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Cuba in exchange for the removal of the missiles, the president told the British leader “that would leave Castro in power,” as if the United States could demand his removal. The only way out of this was to negotiate, yet the experts on the NSC staff were advising “the primary Soviet tactic will be to draw the U.S. into negotiations, meanwhile getting a standstill.”

Khrushchev had indeed been willing to dawdle until the missiles were in place and only then negotiate, but he was realizing that he might be faced with the imminent invasion of Cuba. He wrote a letter to Kennedy that arrived late Friday evening, October 26. If the letter rambled, it was no more than human emotions often ramble. It was a display that some in Washington feared meant that the Soviet leader had become unstable, overly emotional, and dangerously incoherent. Bobby understood, as some of his more phlegmatic colleagues could not, that “it was not incoherent, and the emotion was directed at the death, destruction, and anarchy that nuclear war would bring to his people and all mankind.”

Khrushchev’s letter pleaded with Kennedy to back off his blockade of Soviet ships. In exchange, Khrushchev would “not transport armaments of any kind to Cuba” during negotiations. For all its high emotional tenor, the letter proposed a subtle, carefully constructed solution. Everything would change, Khrushchev wrote, if Kennedy gave assurances “that the USA itself would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from actions of this sort.” Kennedy would have to call off his covert operations
against Cuba and rein in the Cuban exiles and their attacks on Castro’s regime. If that was done, as the Soviet leader saw it, “the question of armaments would disappear,” and there would be no reasons for Russian missiles.

I don’t know whether you can understand me and believe me. But I should like to have you believe in yourself and to agree that one cannot give way to passions…. Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.

The next morning Kennedy received a second, more formal letter in which Khrushchev proposed a new element. The United States would not only have to make its all-encompassing noninvasion pledge but also remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. This latter idea had been discussed in Ex Comm meetings, broached with Bolshakov, and in other ways thrown on the table as a possibility. The Soviets announced over Radio Moscow their offer of a compromise, letting the world see what Kennedy himself realized would be regarded by most people “as not an unreasonable solution.”

In this moment the cold war had reached its high point, not only in its imminent dangers but also in all the posturing of power. The military chiefs were the most adamant in their opposition to trading off these missiles for a result some would dare call peace. They stirred restlessly, fancying themselves in a death struggle against an implacable Communist foe. Stripped of their ideological veneer, Generals LeMay and Taylor were like the brightly plumed gentlemen leading the cavalry in the charge of the light brigade during the Crimean War. These military chiefs stood in their stirrups, swords raised, ready to charge through the valley of death in the name of honor.

“The missiles [in Turkey] were worthless in the Eisenhower administration,” reflected McNamara two decades later. “They sure as hell were worthless and known to be worthless in the Kennedy administration. And yet, because the Soviets … said, in effect … ‘We won’t remove our missiles from Cuba unless you remove yours from Turkey,’ there was almost a requirement that we go to war with the Soviets to preserve missiles in Turkey that were worthless.”

Kennedy was in a predicament of excruciating difficulty. Khrushchev might coo his sweet song of peace, but as he did so his soldiers hurried to finish
their Cuban missile bases. At least five bases already appeared operational. As Kennedy discussed a response with the civilian leaders of Ex Comm, the Joint Chiefs were preparing for Oplan 312, a full-scale air strike on October 29, followed seven days later by Oplan 316, the invasion of Cuba. The military leaders believed that they had to overwhelm the enemy. First, waves of air strikes would pulverize the missile sites, the airports, and the military facilities. Then the most massive American invasion since D-Day would move rapidly through the shell-shocked, demoralized defenders.

Bombing rarely decimates an enemy. Some of the missile sites may have survived, and surely many of the Cubans and their Soviet allies on the island would have defended it to the death. Moreover, the military chiefs did not know that the Soviet weapons included tactical nuclear-tipped missiles. Most of these Luna missiles would not be taken out in air raids. In an invasion the Soviet commander, General Issa Pliyev, had originally been authorized to use them, but on October 27, Moscow changed that directive, requiring formal authorization from officials in Russia. In the lexicon of the nuclear age, these were not major weapons, but anyone within half a mile of the center of the blast would die, most of them immediately, though a few would survive only to succumb within a few weeks to radiation poisoning. Once the Soviet launched their Lunas against the invading Americans, Kennedy would doubtless respond with nuclear weapons too, and World War III would likely begin.

The danger was that Kennedy and the others might become so immersed in the minutiae of the moment that they would not be able to stand back and see the full scale of what was at stake. Only Kennedy seemed able to distance himself enough to see this crisis set in the context of history and human conduct.

“If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we’ll just have to face a radical decline in the effectiveness [of NATO],” Bundy told the president on October 27. Kennedy’s NSC adviser probably did not know that, through Bolshakov, the administration had informally and secretly proposed such a trade.

“This trade has appeal,” Kennedy replied. “Now, if we reject it out of hand, and then have to take military action against Cuba, then we’ll also face a decline [in NATO].” Kennedy faced square on the natural self-interest of men, even if they wore the badge of allies. He knew that those same Europeans who would condemn him for withdrawing the Jupiter missiles would complain even louder if America went to war over Cuba.

When Kennedy spoke of these allies, he displayed a passion that he rarely displayed to his nation’s enemies. “We all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow, and that’s what’s going to happen
to NATO,” he told his colleagues. “When we start these things and they grab Berlin, everybody’s going to say, ‘Well, that was a pretty good proposition.’ … Today it sounds great to reject it [trading off the Turkish missiles], but it’s not going to after we do something.”

The other part of the deal was the promise not to invade Cuba, which to Bobby was almost as big a problem as Turkey. “Well, the only thing is, we are proposing in here the abandonment …” he began.

“What?” Kennedy said urgently. “What? What are we proposing?”

“The abandonment of Cuba,” Bobby repeated.

“No, we’re just promising not to invade,” said Sorensen, always the wordsmith.

“Not to invade,” McNamara repeated. “We changed that language.”