An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  A meeting with congressional leaders for an hour before he spoke to the nation heightened his doubts about being able to generate the strong support he felt essential in the crisis. Their opposition to a blockade was as intense as that voiced by the Chiefs and seemed more likely to become public; unlike the military, congressional barons were not under presidential command. Senator Richard Russell saw a blockade as a weak response to the Soviet action. “It seems to me that we are at a crossroads,” he said. “We’re either a first-class power or we’re not.” Since Russell believed that a war with Russia was “coming someday,” he thought that the time to fight was now. William Fulbright also favored an invasion. He saw a blockade as the worst possible policy; by contrast, an invasion of Cuba would “not actually [be] an affront to Russia.” Seizing or sinking a Russian ship was an act of war. “It is not an act of war against Russia to attack Cuba,” he said.

  As they left the meeting, Kennedy joked with Hubert Humphrey: “If I’d known the job was this tough, I wouldn’t have beaten you in West Virginia.” “I knew, and that’s why I let you beat me,” Humphrey answered. Facing the possibility of an imminent nuclear war, the pressure on Kennedy was unimaginable. It was one reason for his calls to the three ex-presidents. He thought they were the only ones who could imagine his burden. “No one,” Kennedy told historian David Herbert Donald in February 1962, “has a right to grade a President—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made decisions.” Eisenhower was particularly helpful to Kennedy: “No matter what you’re trying to do,” he said, “. . . I’ll be doing my best to support it.”

  Kennedy later described his session with the congressional leaders as “the most difficult meeting. . . . It was a tremendous strain,” he told Bobby, who had been absent. Kennedy understood their outrage at Khrushchev’s recklessness; it mirrored his own anger when he first heard about the missiles and Khrushchev’s deception in putting them in Cuba. But unlike the congressmen, he could not allow his anger or any sense of personal slight to cloud his judgment. As for Russell and Fulbright, he banked on their patriotism and party ties to ensure their support. He also expected the public to rally behind him, which would discourage military and political opponents of the blockade from taking issue with his policy.

  KENNEDY SAW HIS SPEECH to the country and the world explaining the crisis and his choice of a blockade as crucial not only in bringing Americans together but also in pressuring Khrushchev to accede to his demands. He also sent Khrushchev a letter, which Dobrynin received at the State Department an hour before Kennedy spoke. He had an ongoing concern, Kennedy wrote, that “your Government would not correctly understand the will and determination of the United States in any given situation.” He feared a Soviet miscalculation, “since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.” He reminded Khrushchev that “certain developments” in Cuba would force the United States to “do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.” He insisted that Khrushchev remove the missile bases and other offensive weapons in Cuba that were threatening Western Hemisphere nations.

  Kennedy’s seventeen-minute speech Monday night reached one hundred million Americans, who had been alerted to the crisis by the media; it was the largest audience ever up to that point for a presidential address. The president’s words matched his grim demeanor. Looking drawn and tired, he spoke more deliberately than usual, making clear the gravity of what the United States and USSR, and, indeed, the whole world faced. Moscow had created a “nuclear strike capability” in Cuba. The missiles could hit Washington, D.C., or any other city in the southeastern United States. IRBMs, when installed, could strike most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere. Kennedy bluntly condemned the Soviets for lying: The deployment represented a total breach of faith with repeated Soviet promises to supply Cuba with only defensive weapons. The United States, Kennedy announced, could not tolerate this threat to its security and would henceforth quarantine Cuba to block all offensive weapons from reaching the island. A Soviet failure to stop its buildup would justify additional U.S. action. Any use of the missiles already in Cuba would bring retaliatory attacks against the Soviet Union. Kennedy demanded prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba under U.N. supervision. He also promised to counter any threat to America’s allies, including “the brave people of West Berlin.”

  With no response yet from Khrushchev on Tuesday morning, the country and the world feared the worse. Rusk woke George Ball, who was sleeping on a couch in his State Department office, with some graveyard humor: “We have won a considerable victory,” he said. “You and I are still alive.” The two needed to prepare for a 10:00 A.M. Ex Comm meeting at the White House. Kennedy had issued a National Security Action Memorandum giving formal status to the group, which was to meet every morning in the Cabinet Room for the duration of the “current crisis.”

  Ex Comm’s first priority Tuesday was to ensure domestic support by convincing people in the Congress and the press that the administration had not been dilatory in identifying the offensive threat in Cuba. The president and Bobby agreed that McCone should brief skeptics about the timeliness of their actions. Kennedy also wanted the public to understand that the only way the United States could have stopped the Soviet deployment was through an invasion of Cuba in the previous two years, but, he reminded his advisers, “there wasn’t anybody suggesting an invasion of Cuba at a time when they necessarily could have stopped these things coming onto the island.” The committee endorsed Stevenson’s use at the U.N. of reconnaissance photos to combat Soviet charges that a crisis was being manufactured as a pretext for invading Cuba. The discussion also produced an agreement that if a U-2 reconnaissance plane were lost, the United States would destroy a SAM site.

  A reply from Khrushchev, which reached the president by noon, gave little hope of a peaceful settlement. Khrushchev complained that Kennedy’s speech and letter to him represented a “serious threat to peace.” A U.S. quarantine would be a “gross violation of . . . international norms.” Khrushchev reaffirmed that the weapons going to Cuba were defensive and urged Kennedy to “renounce actions pursued by you, which could lead to catastrophic consequences.” Kennedy read Khrushchev’s letter on the phone to Lucius Clay, who had ended his service as Kennedy’s special representative in Berlin in the spring of 1962. The president asked Clay to make himself available for consultations and predicted that they were going to face “difficulties in Berlin as well as other places.”

  By late afternoon, after Rusk, in what some called his finest hour, had persuaded the Organization of American States to give unanimous approval to Kennedy’s announced plan, Kennedy ordered a quarantine to begin the next morning. At an evening meeting, Ex Comm discussed how to enforce the blockade against twenty-seven Soviet and Eastern-bloc ships heading for Cuba. To avoid unnecessary tensions, they agreed not to stop and search ships that reversed course. They also agreed to answer Khrushchev’s letter with a reaffirmation of their view that the Soviets had caused the current crisis by “secretly furnishing offensive weapons to Cuba.” Kennedy’s reply restated his intention to enforce the quarantine and asked that they both “show prudence and do nothing . . . to make the situation more difficult to control.”

  At the close of the evening meeting, Kennedy recorded a candid conversation with his brother. “How does it look?” Bobby asked. “Ah, looks like hell—looks real mean, doesn’t it?” Kennedy responded rhetorically. He nevertheless felt that they had done the right thing. “If they get this mean on this one, it’s just a question of where they go about it next. No choice,” Kennedy said. “I don’t think there was a choice.” Bobby confirmed his brother’s conclusion: “Well, there isn’t any choice. . . .
You would have been impeached,” he said. “That’s what I think,” Kennedy declared. “I would have been impeached.”

  In his eagerness to find a way out of the crisis, Bobby had asked journalists Frank Holeman and Charles Bartlett to tell Bolshakov that the White House might be receptive to dismantling Jupiter missiles in Turkey if the Soviets removed the missiles in Cuba. But the American move could come only after the Soviets had acted—“in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war.” When Bobby reported to Kennedy, the president suggested that his brother directly approach Dobrynin, which he did that evening. Telling the ambassador that he was there on his own, without instructions from the president, Bobby angrily accused him and Khrushchev of “hypocritical, misleading and false” actions. Bobby asked “if the ships were going to go through to Cuba.” Dobrynin believed they would. As he left, Bobby declared, “I don’t know how all this will end, but we intend to stop your ships.”

  At the morning Ex Comm meeting on the twenty-fourth, the group feared that they were on the brink of an unavoidable disaster. The Soviets were making “rapid progress” in the completion of their missile sites and bringing their military forces “into a complete state of readiness.” In fact, by the morning of the twenty-fourth, all of the Soviet MRBMs and their warheads were in Cuba and close to operational. In addition, Soviet ships were continuing on course, and two of them, which seemed to be carrying “offensive weapons,” would approach the quarantine line by about noon, or in two hours. The presence of Soviet submarines screening the ships made it “a very dangerous situation.” U.S. forces had increased their state of readiness from Defense Condition 3 to DEFCON 2, only one level below readiness for a general war. Soviet military intelligence had intercepted an order from the Pentagon to the Strategic Air Command to begin a nuclear alert.

  The president’s tension was reflected in his appearance and physical movements. “This was the moment . . . which we hoped would never come,” Bobby wrote later. “The danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all. . . . These few minutes were the time of greatest worry by the President. His hand went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust and had we done something wrong? . . . I felt we were on the edge of a precipice and it was as if there were no way off.”

  Only a State Department intelligence report gave a glimmer of hope. Khrushchev’s “public line,” the analysts advised—which continued to be that Moscow had no offensive weapons in Cuba—“seems designed to leave him with some option to back off, if he chooses.” A written report handed to McCone during the meeting suggested that Khrushchev might be doing just that. “Mr. President,” McCone interrupted McNamara, who was explaining how the navy would deal with the Soviet subs, “I have a note just handed to me. . . . It says we’ve just received information through ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters—and I don’t know what that means—have either stopped or reversed course.” McCone left the room to ask for clarification on what “Cuban waters” meant: Were these ships approaching or leaving Cuba? The good news that it was indeed ships heading toward Cuba momentarily broke the mood of dire concern. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Rusk whispered to Bundy, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.” But no one saw this as an end to the crisis. There were serious concerns that a U.S. naval vessel might deepen the crisis by unauthorized actions. Did our navy know that it was not supposed to pursue the retreating ships? Rusk asked. Kennedy worried that a destroyer might sink a ship that had turned around.

  His concern was warranted. In the afternoon, McNamara went to the navy’s command center in the Pentagon, a secure room under constant marine guard. McNamara learned that it had taken hours for some of the information on Soviet ship movements to reach the White House. He began chiding the duty officers for the delay, when Admiral George Anderson, the navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, entered. Mindful of the president’s concern about unauthorized navy action, McNamara began interrogating Anderson about procedures for dealing with the Soviet ships. Anderson saw the president’s instructions as an unwarranted interference in the navy’s freedom to do its job. Anderson told McNamara that his local commanders would decide on the details of how to deal with Soviet ships crossing the quarantine line, and said, “We’ve been doing this ever since the days of John Paul Jones.” He waved the navy regulations manual at McNamara, saying, “It’s all in there.” McNamara heatedly replied, “I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done. I want to know what you are going to do, now.” The objective was to deter Khrushchev and avert a nuclear war, McNamara explained. Anderson answered that they would shoot across the bow, and if the ship did not stop, they would disable its rudder. Anderson defiantly added, “Now, Mr. Secretary, if you and your deputy will go back to your offices, the navy will run the blockade.” McNamara ordered him not to fire at anything without his permission and left. “That’s the end of Anderson,” the secretary told Gilpatric, who had witnessed the exchange. “He’s lost my confidence.” (In 1963, Kennedy made him ambassador to Portugal.)

  At a late-afternoon meeting with congressional leaders, Kennedy reported some hopeful signs. Some of the ships headed for Cuba had changed course, and Khrushchev had sent British pacifist Bertrand Russell a telegram promising no rash actions or response to American provocations. He intended to do everything possible to avoid war, he said, including a meeting with Kennedy. Nevertheless, Kennedy emphasized that they would not know for twenty-four hours whether the Soviets would still try to cross the quarantine line, and they still had the problem of getting the missiles removed from Cuba. “If they respect the quarantine,” Kennedy told Harold Macmillan on the telephone that evening, “then we get the second stage of this problem, and work continues on the missiles. Do we then tell them that if they don’t get the missiles out, that we’re going to invade Cuba? He will then say that if we invade Cuba that there’s going to be a general nuclear assault, and he will in any case grab Berlin. Or do we just let the nuclear work go on, figuring he won’t ever dare fire them, and when he tries to grab Berlin, we then go into Cuba?”

  Khrushchev put a fresh damper on hopes that Moscow would not challenge the quarantine, with a letter arriving on the night of the twenty-fourth. His language was harsh and uncompromising. He objected to the U.S. “ultimatum” and threat of “force,” described U.S. actions toward Cuba as “the folly of degenerate imperialism,” and refused to submit to the blockade. We intend “to protect our rights,” he wrote, and ominously declared, “We have everything necessary to do so.”

  At the same time, however, Khrushchev invited William E. Knox, the head of Westinghouse International, who was in Moscow on business, to meet with him at the Kremlin. During a three-and-a-quarter-hour conversation in which Khrushchev was “calm, friendly and frank,” he acknowledged that he had ballistic missiles with both conventional and thermonuclear warheads in Cuba, and that if the U.S. government “really wanted to learn what kind of weapons were available for the defense of Cuba . . . all it had to do was to attack Cuba and Americans would find out very quickly. He then said he was not interested in the destruction of the world, but if we all wanted to meet in Hell, it was up to us.” He declared himself “anxious to have a meeting with President Kennedy; that he would be glad to receive him in Moscow . . . [or] to visit him in Washington; they both could embark on naval vessels and rendezvous at sea; or they could meet at some neutral place where, without fanfare, some of the major problems between our two great countries could be resolved.”

  An unyielding reply from Kennedy to Khrushchev’s letter, which reached Moscow on the morning of the twenty-fifth, plus indications that the Americans might invade Cuba, convinced Khrushchev it was time to negotiate an end to the crisis. More than anything else, it was Khrushchev’s concern with Soviet military inferiority that comp
elled him to back down. “He could not go to war in the Caribbean with any hope of prevailing,” Fursenko and Naftali write.

  During a midday Kremlin meeting, Khrushchev stated his eagerness for a resolution of the U.S.-Soviet missile crisis. Additional caustic exchanges with Kennedy would be unproductive, he said. Instead, he proposed that four transports carrying missiles to Cuba now turn back and a new means be found to protect Cuba or make it into “a zone of peace.” His solution was for the United States to pledge not to invade Cuba in return for dismantling the missiles, which the U.N. could verify.

  Kennedy spent the twenty-fifth temporizing. Since a dozen Soviet ships had turned away from the quarantine line, the White House had some time to consider which remaining Cuba-bound ships to stop and inspect. Kennedy told the morning Ex Comm meeting that he did not want “a sense of euphoria to get around. That [October 24] message of Khrushchev is much tougher than that.” At the same time, however, a proposal from U.N. secretary general U Thant for a cooling-off period, during which Moscow and Washington would avoid tests of the quarantine, persuaded Kennedy to temporarily suspend a decision to board a Soviet ship. Kennedy told U Thant that the solution to the crisis was Soviet removal of offensive weapons from Cuba. Kennedy now also told Macmillan, “I don’t want to have a fight with a Russian ship tomorrow morning, and a search of it at a time when it appears that U Thant has got the Russians to agree not to continue.”