The Passage of Power (48 page)

He was pounding home the idea that the time for negotiation—at least for negotiation alone—was over, that immediate military action was needed, rallying the hawks. In the midst of an exchange with two of them, Treasury Secretary Dillon and former ambassador to Russia
Llewellyn Thompson, he demanded: “You just ask yourself what made the greatest impression on you today, whether
it was his [Khrushchev’s] letter last night, or whether it was his letter this morning, or whether it was that U-2 boy going down?”

“The U-2 boy,” Dillon replied. “That’s exactly right; that’s what did it,” Johnson said. “And that [attacking a SAM site] is what’s going to make an impression on him [Khrushchev]—not all these signals [letters] that each one of us write. He is an expert on that palaver.”

Johnson was making an argument with the force—so long held in check—that carried all before it, and by the time President Kennedy returned to the Cabinet Room, about 7:20, the effect he had had on the hawks was obvious. Bundy told the President that “There is
a
very substantial difference between us,” and Dillon and Thompson made that clear. Dillon said,
“It
would probably be more effective and make more of an impression on him if we did do what we said we were going to do before, and just go in and knock out this one SAM site.… Don’t say anything. Just do that.”
“They’ve
upped the price and they’ve upped the action,” Thompson said. “And I think we have to bring them back by upping our action.” And Johnson for once engaged Kennedy in an exchange, which showed how substantial a difference there was between
him
and the President. When Kennedy tried to explain that escalation such as knocking out a SAM site might well end in invasion, and
“We
can’t very well invade Cuba, with all this toil and blood it’s going to be, when we could have gotten them [the Soviet missiles] out by making a deal on the same missiles in Turkey,” Johnson interrupted him.

“It
doesn’t mean just missiles,” he said. To get the Russian bombers and troops out of Cuba as well, another trade would be necessary. And if America took its planes and troops out of Turkey, “Why then your whole foreign policy is gone. You take everything out of Turkey. Twenty thousand men, all your technicians, and all your planes and all your missiles. And crumble.”

“How else are we going to get those
missiles out of there [Cuba] then?” Kennedy said. “That’s the problem.”

He was still playing for time—time that could bring peace, not war. He wanted to see if his letter to Khrushchev, which he had had his brother hand-deliver to Ambassador
Anatoly Dobrynin, had any effect, and in the meantime he wasn’t taking any action. Everyone should “get a
bite
to eat,” he said, and reconvene at nine o’clock. Then “we’ll see what we do about the plane,” he said, and discuss “this Turkish thing.”

A
S THE FIFTEEN MEMBERS
of
ExComm were filing out of the Cabinet Room to go to dinner, a quiet word was said to eight of them—Robert Kennedy, of course; Sorensen, Bundy, Rusk, McNamara, Ball, Thompson, and Deputy Secretary of Defense
Roswell L. Gilpatric—to join the President in the Oval Office for another, more private, discussion. This smaller group included hawks as well as doves—Thompson, Gilpatric and Bundy were, to varying degrees, in the first category—but it did not include the Vice President.
“Lyndon
Johnson was not
invited to that meeting,” Sorensen says. Whether it was the harsh words he had spoken to the Kennedys that evening—If you do the Turkish trade, you “
crumble,
” he had told the President; “We’re backing down,” he had said to Robert—or his complaints during the entire week (“about our being weak”); or his silence when the President had needed his help with the congressional leaders; or the fear that he could not be trusted not to leak confidential information; or the unalloyed hawkishness he had displayed from the first day of the crisis through that very evening toward the “mad dog” in the Kremlin, whatever the reasons, he had his dinner downstairs in the White House mess.

The subject of the discussion in the Oval Office upstairs was what Robert Kennedy should say to Dobrynin, who was probably waiting for him already at the Justice Department.
“One
part of the oral message we discussed was simple, stern, and simply decided,” Bundy was to recall. It was the same message sent in the President’s letter to Khrushchev: remove the
missiles, and there would be no invasion. “Otherwise further American action was unavoidable.” But now Dean Rusk proposed a second, very secret, part: that Bobby should tell Dobrynin “that while there could be no [public] deal over the Turkish missiles, the President was determined to get them out and would do so once the Cuban crisis was resolved.”

“The
moment Rusk made his suggestion it became apparent to all of us that we should agree,” and they did, Bundy says.

And they agreed on something else: the nine men in that room swore themselves to secrecy. All were aware, as Bundy later put it, that if word of the missile trade—a “bargain struck under pressure at the apparent expense of the Turks”—leaked out, it might undermine the Atlantic alliance, and that
“the
potential political cost of appearing to ‘appease’ the Kremlin” would also be high. “Aware as we” also “were from the day’s discussion that for some, even in our closest councils, a unilateral private assurance might appear to betray an ally, we agreed without hesitation that no one not in the room was to be informed of this additional message,” Bundy was to write. The deal remained secret for years. The most important decision of the Kennedy Administration was made without Lyndon Johnson’s knowledge.

A
T HIS MEETING
with Dobrynin, Robert Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador that a letter had just been sent to Khrushchev repeating the offer of a no-invasion pledge if all offensive weapons were removed from Cuba:
“I
said that those missile bases had to go and they had to go right away. We had to have a commitment by at least tomorrow.… He should understand that if he did not remove those bases that we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians.” Then Kennedy said, not in writing but only orally, so there would be nothing on the record, that while there could be no direct
quid pro quo
for the Jupiters, “if some time elapsed … I mentioned 4 or 5
months—I was sure that these matters could be resolved satisfactorily.” Dobrynin did nothing to commit his country, and Robert returned to the White House, about 8:40 p.m., to give his brother, who was having dinner with
Dave Powers, a report so pessimistic that Powers, listening to it, says,
“I
thought it was my last meal.”

W
HEN
E
X
C
OMM RECONVENED
about nine o’clock that Saturday evening, the two brothers were a little late—and during the few minutes before they arrived, there were more strong words from Lyndon Johnson about how to handle the Russians, and, listening to him, Sorensen suddenly felt
“chilled
.” It wasn’t just the bellicosity of the words but the force behind them: Lyndon Johnson could persuade men, and, without the countervailing presence of the brothers, he might, Sorensen saw, be persuading these.

“The
hawks were rising,” he recalls. “Bobby wasn’t there, and I was rather concerned about that. The President wasn’t there, so I didn’t have my strongest allies there. Johnson slapped the table.
‘All
I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and you were walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up ready to strike, the only thing to do was to take a stick and chop its head off.’ There was a little chill in the room after that statement.”

There were strong words, also, from other hawks, these after the President and Bobby had entered the room, for there had still been no American retaliation for the death of an American pilot; Russian ships had been allowed through the quarantine line, and others, notably the
Grozny,
would reach the line Sunday morning; and the missile sites were about to become operational.

“Do
anything about the SAM site that shot down our plane?” Dillon demanded. Temporizing, the President said the guilty site had not yet been definitively identified. “We don’t know [which one] yet, Doug,” he said. McNamara said,
“If
our planes are fired on tomorrow, we ought to fire back.” Kennedy wanted to delay even that, to give negotiations more time, in hope that the messages delivered to Dobrynin might work.
“Let
me say, I think we ought to wait until tomorrow afternoon, to see whether we get any answers.… We’re rapidly approaching a real—” Wait until tomorrow, he said. “If tomorrow they fire at us and we don’t have any answer from the Russians, then Monday it seems to me” would be time enough. “And then go in and take
all
the SAM sites out.” The fate of mankind might hang in the balance; surely the chance for peace could be given one more day;
“I
think we ought to keep tomorrow clean,” Jack Kennedy said.

There was still the
Grozny.
It was going to reach the quarantine line at about 8:15 or 8:30 Sunday morning. This time, it was the younger brother who spoke, in a low, very soft voice.
“It’s
just a question of whether we want to intercept that at all tomorrow, or let it go through.… Whether this ship gets in or not, it’s not really going to count in the big picture.… Isn’t it possible to decide tomorrow?”
“Yes
, we can wait until about noon tomorrow,” McNamara said. And finally, Jack
Kennedy decided.
“Give
them that last chance,” he said—and peace had one more day.

T
HERE WAS LITTLE OPTIMISM
that that extra day would bring peace. “Saturday night was almost the blackest of all,” Schlesinger was to recall. “Unless Khrushchev came through in a few hours, the meeting of the Executive Committee on Sunday might well face the most terrible decisions.”
Strategic Air Command bombers were circling endlessly over the Arctic that night; the crews of other bombers were being handed their target packets for bombing runs they might have to make the next day; American destroyers were circling in the Atlantic—with, a few fathoms below them, enemy submarines; the Fifth Marine Expeditionary Brigade began boarding ships to invasion staging areas; watching the sun set that Saturday night, McNamara wondered if he would live out the week.
“But
the next morning, a golden autumn Sunday morning,” the
Grozny
suddenly came to a dead stop, and the nine o’clock newscasts were interrupted by a bulletin: Khrushchev had accepted Kennedy’s terms, the no-missiles, no-invasion terms to which the President had brought him back by ignoring the second letter. The letter ended with this salutation to John Fitzgerald Kennedy:
“With
respect for you, Khrushchev.”

ExComm met that Sunday at eleven. When the President walked into the room, everyone stood up, standing silently until he sat down. As he began the meeting, there wasn’t, Ted Sorensen recalls,
“a
trace of excitement or even exultation” in his bearing.

I
T HAD BEEN NO OVERSIGHT
that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t invited to that crucial conference in the Oval Office on Saturday evening.

On Sunday, after the final ExComm meeting, Jack Kennedy said to his brother that this was the night he should go to the theater, like Lincoln after the Union victory in the Civil War, and Robert—the subject of assassination having been raised, and with it, of course, the reminder that the Vice President would thereupon become President—said that “if he was going to the theater, I would go too, having witnessed the inability of Johnson to make any contribution of any kind during all the conversations.” In later years, he would recall Johnson’s displeasure
“with
what we were doing,” the way, in Bobby’s words, that “he would circulate and whine and complain about our being weak,” while never making “any suggestions or recommendations” himself. The people who “had participated in all these discussions,” Robert Kennedy was to say, “were bright and energetic people. We had perhaps amongst the most able in the country, and if any one of half a dozen of them were President the world would have been very likely plunged in a catastrophic war.” Lyndon Johnson, he would make clear, was one of that half dozen. Jack Kennedy, as always, was more oblique, but, through
the means of another, shorter, list, he also made his feelings clear. Recalls his friend, the journalist
Bartlett:
“He
said after the Cuban Missile Crisis that there were three men on that Executive Committee that he would be glad to see become President of the United States: McNamara, Dillon, and his brother Bobby. He said that a couple of times.” Three men whom John F. Kennedy would be happy to have succeed him as President. The Vice President wasn’t one of them.

“You
must know as well or better than I President Kennedy’s steadily diminishing opinion of him,”
Jacqueline Kennedy would, years after the assassination, write in a private letter to Ted Sorensen. “As his term progressed, he grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became President. He was truly frightened at the prospect.”

E
ARLY IN
D
ECEMBER
, Lyndon Johnson received a note from Robert Kennedy saying that he,
“together
with some of the other Executive Committee members,” was buying a Christmas present for the President
“in
remembrance of our days together” during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “We are not yet certain of the cost but when that small matter is worked out I will write you a letter asking for a ‘voluntary’ contribution,” Kennedy said.

While Johnson had not been one of the ExComm members who had planned the gift—a sterling silver plaque showing the month of October with the thirteen days of the crisis in bold numerals—the note at least implied that he would be invited to the presentation. “
Mac Bundy will be in touch with you about” the arrangements, it said. When, however, on December 17, Bundy’s secretary called one of Johnson’s secretaries,
Winnie Coates, to inform her that the presentation would be the next morning at 8:15, the call was not exactly an invitation. “She said Mr. Bundy felt it would not be necessary for everybody to be there at such an ungodly hour,” Winnie reported.