Concerning my case, Bobby and Jack are not nearly so interested in my powers of counsel, but do like to hear themselves speak candidly (which they cannot do all that often with working subordinates or opponents). I am called on, therefore, to listen. Hugh is called on to speak up. Be assured that we saw a lot of the Kennedys last week.
They were enraged at Khrushchev and they were not feeling too good about Masarov. For months, Boris had been giving Bobby assurances that the Premier would never send nuclear missiles to Cuba. I suppose the operative principle is that you never tell a lie until it will be maximally effective. Of course, Masarov claims that he is as surprised as the Kennedys.
No matter where the lie originates, you can be certain that Jack is, at this moment, as personally ill-disposed toward the Soviets as he has ever been; in such a frame of mind, he is nonetheless obliged to withstand some powerful pressures being applied by the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. (Let me tell you that it is one committee I pay attention to!) Everyone in White House circles is using the words hawk and dove these days, and be assured, some formidable hawks are perched up in Excom. As of October 17, a lot of them were all-out for bombing Cuba immediately. Just obliterate the missile bases! You find among these high-force presences such men as Maxwell Taylor and Dean Acheson, most of the Joint Chiefs, plus McCloy, and Nitze and McCone. Bobby, who has been the leader of the doves, has argued that any surprise bombing would involve killing tens of thousands of civilians. “It’s a moral question,” he said to me in that wonderful, innocent way of his. For a very tough young man, he is always discovering the wheel. But I know the thought of death does bother him very much these days. Neither Jack nor Bobby has ever spoken word one to me about Marilyn Monroe, but I feel that her suicide shook them somewhat. The death of others seems awfully palpable to Bobby these days. And yet there he is presiding over the Executive Committee of the National Security Council while they argue whether to initiate a blockade (McNamara, Gilpatric, Ball, Stevenson, and Sorensen) or, as the hawks keep insisting, loose that air strike without prior notification of war.
“That,” Bobby tells them, “is right along the lines of Pearl Harbor.”
He made the mistake of saying as much to Dean Acheson, who was sufficiently incensed then to take a private lunch with Jack last Thursday, October 18. Dean Acheson is proud of the fact that he detests emotional and intuitive responses. He said, “Mr. President, there is no choice. You have to call an air strike. The more comprehensive, the better.”
Well, Acheson may be old, but he is still as imperious as Cardinal Richelieu. He was not Secretary of State for too little during the early years of the Cold War, and the few liberal tendencies he might have retained were badly chewed up by his defense of Alger Hiss. Acheson, but for that old gray mustache, even looks like a hawk. “One can analyze the problem from this or that approach,” he tells Jack, “but there is only one effective response. Obliteration of missile capability.”
“I am not happy with that,” said Jack Kennedy, “and Bobby keeps coming around to remind me that such an air strike smacks completely of Pearl Harbor.”
“I cannot believe you said that,” Acheson told him. “Bobby’s clichés are silly. Pearl Harbor could not be more thoroughly useless as an analogy. It is only a label to hide behind. The duty of the presidency is to analyze intolerable problems, and come up with appropriately clear answers. Moral anguish is worth less in the sight of heaven than skilled and disciplined analysis. Tears can be the subtlest creation of the muddled and the weak.” Harry, I promise you, Dean Acheson does talk with just this sort of authority. I would hate to be a small bird in his talons.
Later that afternoon, however, a visit-and-search blockade of Soviet ships approaching Cuba was more or less decided upon by the Executive Committee (McNamara now in the lead) and sent up as a proposal to the President. Next day, Acheson appeared again and said the question had to be reopened; dealing with the Russians was a contest of wills. Since a showdown was going to be inevitable, such confrontations lost their force if too long delayed. A blockade was delay. Secretary Dillon agreed. So did McCone. General Taylor told them that an air strike, to be effective, had to come as quickly as possible. To be gotten ready for Sunday morning, they had to decide it right now, here, on Thursday afternoon. If for Monday, then a decision no later than tomorrow.
If I had been in these councils, I cannot say how I would have reacted. I am a dove, I suppose, but I feel unspeakable anger toward the Soviets. Harry, do you know, listening to Bobby, it came upon me that he is wise. I am beginning to realize he has balance. That same afternoon, in the face of Acheson’s scorn, he told Excom that the world would see an air strike as a sneak attack. We had never been that kind of country, he said, not in one hundred and seventy-five years. It was not in our tradition. We certainly needed forceful action to make the Russians realize that we were serious, but we also had to leave them room to maneuver. Assuming they could recognize that they were out of line on Cuba, we ought to allow them a way to pull back. Blockade was the answer.
That speech of Bobby’s to the Executive Committee proved convincing on Thursday. By Saturday, however, the question was wide-open to debate again. McNamara argued that an air strike would kill hundreds if not thousands of Russians stationed on the missile bases, and we could not predict Khrushchev’s reaction to that event. An air strike, therefore, would lose us control of the situation. An escalation might commence. That could lead to an all-out war. Maxwell Taylor disagreed. This was our last chance, he argued, to destroy the missiles. The Russians, once they no longer possessed such capability in Cuba, would not attempt an escalation; our nuclear powers were superior to theirs. McGeorge Bundy and the Chiefs of Staff supported Taylor.
The President did not give his decision until yesterday, Sunday morning. At that point, he chose the blockade, and began writing the speech he delivered to America tonight. I know he was dreading the political repercussions. The Republicans have been screaming for weeks that there are missiles in Cuba, and he is only now admitting it to the public. So, the loss can be large. Politically speaking, it would have been more advantageous to order the air strike. Then the Republicans would have had to unite behind him.
In any event, we must now wait. It is going to take a few days for the Russian ships to reach the blockade. I am feeling so emotional tonight that I picked Christopher up out of his bed and hugged the sleeping angel so hard that he woke and said, “It’s all right, Mommy, everything will be all right.”
I have the strongest sense of dread, and miss you, Harry, you are dear to me. Do not do anything insane with people like Dix Butler.
Love,
Kittredge
20
EARLY WEDNESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 24, I HOISTED MYSELF OFF A BAR- stool in a cantina on SW 8th Street, picked up my tote bag, and went out to the street with Dix Butler to hail a cab. We were on our way to 6312 Riviera Drive. The radios in all the bars on SW 8th Street were reporting in English or Spanish that two Soviet ships had come within fifty miles of the line of quarantine the U.S. Navy had established around the island of Cuba.
There had been no day in my life like the Monday, the Tuesday, and the Wednesday just passed. In Washington, printouts were being circulated among key personnel at the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and at Langley to show the route of evacuation to underground shelters in Virginia and in Maryland. At JM/WAVE, maps of southern Florida were distributed to a few of us. As I now learned, we had built a twenty-man fallout shelter two years ago in the swamps of the Everglades, and I thought this an interesting achievement since little enough earth in the Everglades could be found two feet above water. A rumor passing from Langley to JM/WAVE had Bobby Kennedy declare that he was not going to a shelter. “If it comes to evacuation, there will be sixty million Americans killed, and as many Russians. I’ll be at Hickory Hill.”
When I passed the story on to Dix Butler, he said, “How do you know Bobby doesn’t have
his own dugout at Hickory Hill?”
That may be taken as a sample of the observations being passed around Zenith. Emotions had gone careening in all directions, as if a stone had been thrown into a flight of birds. It did not seem condign that we should all die so soon. Now when I felt rage it seemed to scald my chest; sorrow was uncomfortably close to weeping; cynicism, on revealing itself, tasted poisonous. It was hard to say who had become more unpopular at JM/WAVE—Fidel Castro, the Cuban exiles, or the brothers K. Bill Harvey was convinced that there would yet be a sellout to Cuba. “If we don’t have a shooting war, Khrushchev will piss all over Kennedy in the negotiations.”
Given such quick alternations of exhilaration and gloom, the thought that there might be power never yet unleashed in oneself also had time to come forth. Miami, soft as a powderpuff, murderous as a scorpion, lay suspended like Nirvana; no one could, when all was said, resist waiting. Except for Harvey. He chafed like a boil about to burst on its incarcerating collar; it took very little effort by Dix Butler to convince the boss of JM/WAVE that he should allow us to go on a mission. Harvey was all for improvising a few missions in this week of emergency.
He did take me aside long enough, however, to say, “Hubbard, I don’t know if I give one toot whether you come back or not, but if you do, and the world continues, I want my ass covered. So you are not to tell Hugh Montague that you are going. Should he contact me concerning you, I will tell him that you took off spontaneously on a job I was restricting to Dix Butler, but that I won’t press charges, which I won’t—that is, between you and me, I won’t—unless you make the mistake of telling the truth to His Lordship. In that case, it will be your word against mine, and you are about to be counterdocumented. Since you want to go out with Butler, write a memo and sign it. You can have it say, ‘I, Herrick Hubbard, acknowledge the receipt of memo number 7,418,537 and will obey instructions pursuant to it.’”
“Have I seen 7,418,537?”
“You will now.” He read it aloud. “All personnel in Office B, JM/WAVE, are hereby instructed to remain within a ten-mile radius of Base for duration of crisis, and will keep themselves in constant availability.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“I am putting 7,418,537 out now. It will be on your desk in ten minutes. Send your reply as soon as you receive it.”
I did. I felt weightless. It occurred to me that I was absolutely free. For I might be dead in two days. So I could lie once again to Hugh Montague. Wild Bill, after all, was using us to some purpose. We would embark on Eugenio Martínez’s boat, La Princesa, with cartons of flares, and bring them into Cuba on rubber dinghies to hand them over to one of Harvey’s networks. These flares would then be available for the Cuban underground to light the way at night for an American invasion force.
It is significant to my state of mind that that was all I knew about our mission. Waiting in such passivity, I wondered if the about-to-be-born on the last day of their nine months in the womb do not also feel the high sad sentiment that all they know of existence is about to be lost forever for they are embarking on an endeavor of high risk.
I was obviously swimming in much emotional soup. I remember standing before a full-length mirror in my furnished apartment trying to attach these highly undisciplined sentiments to the stern expression on the presentable, tall young man who looked back at me. I had never felt further away from the image in the mirror. “Is this what goes on with movie stars?” I recall asking myself.
Early Wednesday afternoon, Butler drove us down to one of our proprietaries, a marina on Key Largo, and we loaded a fourteen-foot inflatable black rubber dinghy with 1,500 pounds of cement-brick and sand to simulate the weight of the equipment and men we would be carrying. Then we rode out to the smaller keys, pushing into mangrove swamps while throttling each of our twin outboards down to a purr, then vamped the craft through shallows at low tide, raising the outboards if necessary, scraping bottom. When Butler was satisfied, we went back to the mooring, carted one motor into a shed, and there in an unlit room with the engine mounted to the inside of a half-filled barrel of water, we practiced simple maintenance in the dark, stripping the little beast and reassembling it. Years ago, I had had one long day like this at the Farm, when they drove us to a cove just south of Norfolk, and brought us up to much the same sort of intense half-competence. What I had learned then I had all but forgotten; would I remember tomorrow what I was studying now?
We drove back to Miami in late afternoon, went to a cantina, had three Planter’s Punches “in honor,” said Butler, “of the plantations we will soon be restoring to their greed-ass shit-bag owners,” and drank to that, and to Berlin—a touchy toast was that—“and to Nirvana,” said Butler, which managed to startle me since I had been resting on just that word in my mind. Were we all growing telepathic now that the end of the world was near? It seemed a logical proposition. I sighed, and the Planter’s Punch carried me back to how beautiful the sea had been this afternoon outside Key Largo, a luminous pale green sea, twice luminous as the shelf dropped off into the iridescence of aquamarine. A myriad of silver minnows escorted our dinghy to the mangrove swamp, threaded the roots beneath the water and were lost to view.
Now we had gone through the door at 6312 Riviera Drive and in a wardrobe closet changed into black high-topped sneakers, black denim pants, a black turtleneck sweater, a black hood with holes for eyes and mouth. It was hot in this anteroom. The polyester suits and tropical shirts of a dozen other men were already suspended from hangers and poles, but I was comprehending why the life of the executioner must be worth its other pains. Dressed all in black, I did not seem to inhabit myself any longer so much as I was an acolyte to the communions who would guard the dominion of death; it was then I comprehended that I had never understood the Agency until this moment; now I knew why I was here. One should not spend one’s life in the halls of a great profession without descending at least once to the cellar chambers—a metaphor, but then I was consuming metaphors on this night the way others in the same brew of anxiety might chew on facts; death was but a metaphor for metaphor, even as the square root of minus one was the mandrake root to guide us into that other world where there might be no roots. I kept thinking of the minnows that swam around our dinghy before disappearing into a forest of underwater foliage not two feet deep.
The interior of 6312 Riviera Drive was barely furnished, but then the model for a barren habitat is a safe house. We passed through a living room paneled in dark wood and by an archway into a dining room where four dark Spanish chairs were grouped around a mahogany dinner table, and I thought of the solemnity of middle-class Spanish life; the wives somber, the children solemn, the father guilty beneath the moral weight of a querulous mistress furious at his parsimony even as she wears the black lingerie he has purchased for her, yes, I must be a servant of death when an empty room offered the intimate history of an unhappy family I had never seen. How close had the Russian freighters approached by now to the line of quarantine?
Beyond the dining room was a door to a glassed-in porch that looked upon a patio; at the other end was the wharf. A large white fishing boat, immanent as mausoleum marble, was rising and falling with the small breath of the tide. I had time to think of Giancana’s dead wife before I stepped on board. Below were ten men in black hoods sitting on bunks in the galley, and only a few looked up. The air proved close if not yet foul, and the lurch of the ship at its mooring was not agreeable.
We waited. We did not speak beneath our hoods. The inboard motors started up, vibrating their intent through my feet, closer to the purpose than I might be. From above, like the sounds of a surgical team impinging on one’s ear through partial anesthetic, I could hear the skipper calling out orders in Spanish. We were casting off. Down in the galley, with no more illumination coming through the portholes than the dock lights of the Miami houses along the canal, our motors sounded as alive as the growl of beasts.
We traveled at low throttle to reduce the wake, and I fell asle
ep passing through the narrow canals of Coral Gables into Biscayne Bay, and by the time I awakened we were in the open sea and the lights of Miami were far to the stern, their sky-glow as plum-colored as that last rose hue of sunset before evening is committed to night. Off the bow, more than a hundred miles to starboard, fainter than the penumbra of the moon, came a glow from Havana itself. It was a black night but a clear sky, and I had time to think that by tomorrow evening, both cities might be burning, and would we witness the sight from land or sea? “Eugenio is going to take us in between Cárdenas and Matanzas,” said Butler. “We’ll make Cuba by three in the morning.”
I nodded. I was still drowsy. In truth, I was stupefied. It occurred to me that death should not come to one in this thick and clouded state.
“Do you want some rum?” asked Butler.
“I’d rather sleep,” I said.
“Man, I’m drum-tight. It’ll stay that way until we get back.”
“I would have expected no less,” I told him, and went below again, thinking no good thoughts about Butler, since he had now given me to understand that sleep before combat was no virtue, but an overindulgence. If Butler’s character was not splendid, his adrenaline was nonetheless superb.
In the galley, men were lying down any way they could, two to a narrow bunk, four on the galley table, two on the galley deck, now three as I joined them. The floorboards were damp, but warm enough in any event, and since others had gone up on deck, there was room to stretch out; I slept between the sloshing of the bilge and the battering of the hull against a rolling swell. The fetid odor that rises from men who eat garlic and perspire in black clothes went through the galley; by the shielded light of a blue ten-watt bulb over the sink, I watched Cubans inching up their black hoods with the instinctive movement of a sleeper wishing to breathe more easily; then pulling them down over their face in the reflex of awakening. To what end were these hoods? Was it their families they were looking to protect, or the bonds of magic? On this dark tropical sea where the Gulf Stream met the long roll of the Atlantic, magic was only a minor ally of commerce, but on the southern shore of Cuba, incantations washed in from the Caribbean. I thought of the facsimile of the Matahambre copper mines that we had constructed at full scale in the Everglades. Over the last nine months, exile commandos had trained there for demolitions work. Mock raids had been practiced. In each training raid we had satisfied the scenario, which was to succeed (figuratively) in dynamiting the model, but we had never been able to blow up the real works. In the last attempt on the Matahambre, eight raiders went ashore in the black hours after midnight, and were flushed by a Castro patrol. Six of the commandos made it back to shore long enough to be evacuated. That had been our most ambitious effort on the Matahambre, and it, too, had failed ignominiously. They never reached shore.