On Monday, October 22, Kennedy implemented his decision to establish a blockade around Cuba: He instructed that “everyone should sing one song in order to make clear that there was now no difference among his advisers”; formally established an ExCOM of the NSC with him as chairman to meet every morning at ten in the Cabinet Room until the crisis ended; met with congressional leaders at the White House to explain his actions; and sent Khrushchev a letter with a copy of a speech he would make that evening. The letter explained why he was establishing a blockade: It was “the minimum necessary to remove the threat to the security of the nations of this hemisphere.” In choosing a blockade, he “assumed that neither you nor 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.”
The initial Soviet response was discouraging and even frightening. Khrushchev replied on October 23 that Kennedy’s statement of the problem represented a “serious threat to peace and security of peoples.” He described the blockade as “aggressive actions against Cuba and against the Soviet Union” and insisted that the weapons in Cuba were “exclusively for defensive purposes.” Kennedy replied that evening describing “the current chain of events” as the result of Moscow’s “offensive weapons” in Cuba, asked that Khrushchev issue “the necessary instructions to your ships to observe the terms of the quarantine,” and expressed “concern that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is.”
That evening, at the end of an NSC meeting, the president and Bobby talked for ten minutes about the coming confrontation with Khrushchev. “How does it look?” Bobby asked. “Looks like hell—looks real mean, doesn’t it?” Kennedy replied. “But . . . there is no other choice. If they get this mean on this one, it’s just a question of where they go about it next.” Bobby agreed. But it wasn’t just the Soviet threat that needed answering as a way to avoid another Munich; the Congress also worried them: Without the quarantine, Bobby said, “You would have been impeached.” Kennedy thought that was right and feared that after the elections the House would try to impeach him anyway for having been slow to respond to the Soviet aggression. But the larger concern was “the great danger and risk in all of this,” which he saw as “a miscalculation—a mistake in judgment.” Having recently read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, a searing account of how “the Germans, the Austrians, the French, and the British . . . somehow seemed to tumble into war . . . through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur,” he feared that while “neither side wanted war over Cuba,” they could find themselves in a conflict for “reasons of ‘security,’ ‘pride’ or ‘face.’” Kennedy was determined not to repeat the German chancellor’s response in 1914 to the question, “How did it all happen?” Which was: “Ah, if only we knew.”
October 24 was a day of near despair followed by hope. Bobby recorded that at a meeting the previous night with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, when he asked if Soviet ships heading for Cuba would try to run the blockade, Dobrynin assumed they would. U.S. readiness for a war had been increased from Defense Condition 3 to DEFCON 2, a prelude to a general war. The Strategic Air Command was put on a nuclear alert: Land- and submarine-based missiles were poised to attack, as were the country’s 1,400-plus bombers loaded with nuclear weapons aimed at preselected Soviet targets. “In fifteen years of intercepting U.S. military messages,” historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali point out, “the Soviet military intelligence service may never have seen anything like this.”
McCone reported at the morning’s ExCOM meeting that the Russians were making rapid progress on the intermediate- and medium-range missile sites. Numerous Soviet ships were heading toward the island, including submarines and three possibly carrying missiles. The Soviets were also bringing their “military forces into a complete state of readiness.”
Bobby recalled that the Wednesday ExCOM meeting “seemed the most trying, the most difficult, and the most filled with tension. . . . I sat across from the President. This was the moment we had prepared for, which we hoped would never come. 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.”
There were also hopeful signs of a Soviet retreat. As McNamara discussed plans for intercepting the Soviet vessels, McCone was handed a message saying that six Soviet ships in Cuban waters had either stopped or reversed course. The blockade seemed to be persuading the Soviets to back away from a confrontation. Rusk whispered to Bundy, who was sitting next to him, “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” At an afternoon meeting with the president, Rusk said that the Kremlin’s public silence about the missiles in Cuba meant they were trying to avoid a war scare. He also thought it significant that Khrushchev had sent a telegram to the British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell, saying: “The Soviet Union will take no rash actions, will not let itself be provoked by the unjustified actions of the United States. We will do everything which depends on us to prevent the launching of a war.”
Yet the crisis was far from over. Kennedy wanted to be sure that there were no plans to grab any of the Soviet ships. McNamara thought not, but Bobby and Rusk asked if the Navy was instructed not to pursue the retreating vessels. Mindful of how some unplanned event could trigger a conflict, Kennedy sent McNamara to the Navy’s operations center in the Pentagon to make sure that ship commanders on quarantine duty strictly followed his orders to let the Soviet vessels retreat without incident. Navy chief of staff Admiral George Anderson was unhappy about the visit from McNamara and Gilpatric, which he saw as unneeded civilian interference. McNamara’s questions about Navy’s plans for stopping ships provoked Anderson to answer that the Navy had been doing this since John Paul Jones and he saw no reason to explain long-standing procedures. He waved a copy of the Navy regulations manual at McNamara and urged him to read it. “I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done,” McNamara exploded. “I want to know what you are going to do now.” McNamara left in a huff, declaring, “That’s the end of Anderson.” (After the crisis, Kennedy forced his retirement and made him ambassador to Portugal.) It also deepened Kennedy’s distrust of his military advisers. If he was going to avert a disaster, part of his challenge was to keep control of headstrong subordinates.
But even if Kennedy could rein in the men under his command, he could not control the Soviets. On the night of the twenty-fourth, he received Khrushchev’s reply to his message of the day before counseling prudence and conformity to the quarantine. Khrushchev described Kennedy’s actions as tantamount to an “ultimatum” that “flung a challenge at us,” threatening Russia with “force.” He denounced Kennedy’s motives as “hatred for the Cuban people and its government” and “considerations of the election campaign in the United States.” It was “the folly of degenerate imperialism.” The United States was engaged in “an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war.” Soviet ships and forces would “protect our rights” on the high seas. It was a terrifying moment; Kennedy could only imagine that the two nations were on the brink of a disastrous war.
But Schlesinger passed along a message from Averell Harriman, whose familiarity with Soviet affairs convinced him that Khrushchev was desperate to find a way out of the crisis. “The instructions to Soviet ships to change course; the message to Bertrand Russell; and his obviously premeditated appearance last night at an American concert in Moscow” were signals that “the
worst mistake we can possibly make is to get tougher and escalate.” At 1:59 in the morning of the twenty-fifth, Kennedy sent Khrushchev a firm but conciliatory note: The crisis was the result not of anything the United States had done, but of the Soviet decision to place offensive weapons in Cuba, despite clear warnings against doing so, and then repeated lies about their actions. Kennedy expressed “regret that these events should cause a deterioration in our relations. I hope that your Government will take the necessary action to permit a restoration of the earlier situation.” Kennedy did not budge on the quarantine.
Kennedy sent his reply without consulting all the members of the ExCOM or any of the Joint Chiefs, who were not to do anything without explicit orders from him. In fact, only Bundy, Rusk, and Sorensen seem to have been involved in drafting Kennedy‘s response, as was made evident when Bundy read both Khrushchev’s letter of the twenty-fourth and the president’s reply to the ExCOM meeting on the morning of the twenty-fifth. In moving forward without a prior full-scale discussion, Kennedy was signaling that the group had reached a consensus and emphasizing that he alone would make the final decisions on any actions that could trigger a war. The exchanges at the morning conference underscored these conditions. Everyone was in agreement that they should accept a proposal from U Thant, the U.N. secretary-general, to hold off on a confrontation at sea to allow discussions that might resolve the crisis. The fact that all Soviet ships with possible additional missiles aboard had reversed course and turned away from Cuba had made the decision easy.
The crisis, as Kennedy made clear in a conversation that evening with British prime minister Harold Macmillan, was anything but over. Kennedy reported that Khrushchev described U.S. behavior as “piratical,” intended to resist it, and had “the means of action against us.” While the Soviets were retreating from a collision by turning around their ships with “sensitive cargo,” Kennedy saw it as only a first step in settling the larger issue, which was to persuade Moscow to stop building the missile sites and remove all offensive weapons from Cuba.
On Friday morning, October 26, the odds of achieving a Soviet stand-down seemed very long indeed. With U.S. newspapers featuring front-page stories about a buildup of American forces in the southern United States in preparation for an offensive against Cuba, and Kennedy at the morning ExCOM meeting saying that the missiles had to go, the likelihood of military action seemed very great. And time was running out: “We can’t screw around for two weeks” and wait for them to finish building these sites, Kennedy said. The quarantine itself wasn’t going to get the missiles out. It was only going to prevent additional missile shipments to Cuba. “We’re either going to trade them out, or we’re going to have to go in and get them out ourselves.” After the morning meeting, Kennedy told the British ambassador that with the Soviets pushing to complete the construction of the missile sites, the United States could not wait much longer before taking action. During a brief meeting with intelligence officials at noon, Kennedy said that he saw only two ways to get rid of the missiles—through diplomatic discussions, which he didn’t believe “will be successful,” or air strikes followed by an invasion, which would likely trigger the firing of the Soviet missiles.
If he had to resort to military action, however, he was determined to make sure it would be the result of his conscious decision and not some misstep or miscalculation by a subordinate. During the afternoon, when Lincoln White, the State Department’s press spokesman, told journalists at a daily press briefing that the United States would be ready for “further action” if necessary, it added to the war scare. Kennedy was furious. He called White and told him, “That’s the sort of stuff that’s got to come from me and the White House. Christ, we’re meeting every morning on this to control this, the escalation.” The press was now saying that “further action is going to be taken,” and Kennedy feared that this coverage was increasing the pressure for escalation. So, he told White, “You have to be goddamn careful.” Otherwise, we will “find ourselves getting out of control.”
Meanwhile, all this talk of action and escalation, including four cables from the Soviet Embassy in Washington warning that Kennedy was on the verge of going to war, frightened Khrushchev. On October 25, after receiving Kennedy’s latest unyielding letter, he told Kremlin colleagues that he wished to end the crisis. He planned to tell Kennedy that if he promised not to invade Cuba, he would remove the missiles from the island.
At 4:30 in the afternoon, Rusk called the president to report that U Thant thought that Moscow was open to an exchange in which they would remove the missiles from Cuba if the United States pledged not to invade. The Canadians reported hearing the same thing. Kennedy was entirely receptive, telling Stevenson that he was eager for prompt agreement on Khrushchev’s terms: a no-invasion pledge in return for removing the missiles. At the same time, Rusk reported that Moscow’s KGB officer at the Washington embassy had contacted ABC reporter John Scali to say that Khrushchev would be interested in the exchange proposed to U Thant at the U.N.
And then at about nine in the evening, a letter from Khrushchev reached the White House with confirmation of Soviet eagerness for a deal. Khrushchev praised Kennedy’s understanding of the situation. He declared his love of peace: “War is our enemy and a calamity for all of the peoples.” He assured Kennedy that his concerns about “offensive weapons in Cuba were groundless.” But “let us not quarrel now,” he added. “It is apparent that I will not be able to convince you of this.” And though he went on for several pages making the case against any Soviet aggressive intentions and declaring his sole interest in defending Cuba from an American assault, he ended by asking Kennedy to promise not to invade Cuba or support any sort of forces planning an invasion; then the missiles would disappear from Cuba.
Although an end to the crisis now seemed more likely, a settlement remained elusive. When Kennedy met with his advisers the next morning, they continued to see obstacles to an agreement. Six Soviet and three satellite ships were heading toward the quarantine line and work at the missile sites was proceeding night and day. Also, newspapers were reporting that Khrushchev had released his October 26 letter to Kennedy, which included an offer to swap the missiles in Cuba for U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey, a condition not mentioned in his previous night’s private letter. Was Khrushchev changing his position? And because the Turks and NATO allies would see any such trade as abandoning them, while neutral observers would consider it a fair deal, how could Kennedy answer Khrushchev’s public proposal? All the advisers, including Bobby Kennedy, argued against letting Khrushchev conflate the two issues. But Kennedy was more focused on ending the current crisis, saying that a lot of people would see the Turkish-Cuban swap as a rather reasonable position. Kennedy and Stevenson, who had been brought into the discussion, urged that they ignore the Turkish part of the bargain and focus on Khrushchev’s narrower proposal for a U.S. pledge tied to elimination of the Cuban missiles.
Kennedy now suggested that the White House announce that it was dealing with several different, complicated proposals that required consideration over a period of time. Kennedy told the ExCOM that if the Soviets insisted on the Turkish-Cuban exchange, it would remain difficult to resist. People all over the world would see it as crazy for the United States to fight a nuclear war over keeping its missiles in Turkey. Kennedy ended the morning meeting with a reminder to the group that the Jupiters were dispensable. Whatever his advisers might think, Kennedy was ready to trade the missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba and an end to a crisis that threatened a disaster.
The discussion continued in an afternoon session lasting almost four hours. Between meetings, the Joint Chiefs had urged the president to order a massive air strike against Cuba the following day, Sunday, or at the latest Monday, with an invasion to come shortly after. At the same time, reports arrived of a near clash between Soviet and U.S. planes off Alaska, where a U-2 had strayed into Soviet airspace. In addition, U.S. reconnaissance flights over Cuba had, for the first time, been fire
d on and a U-2 had been brought down with the death of the pilot. The Chiefs saw the crisis as an opportunity to hit back at the Soviets. What was the use of America’s military advantage if they didn’t exercise it when they had the chance?
The ExCOM focused on how to respond to Khrushchev’s private and public pronouncements. Kennedy did not want simply to ignore or reject his public proposal about the Jupiters. Instead, Kennedy suggested that they urge Soviet suspension of work on the Cuban missile sites and assurances that the missiles already in place were being made inoperable. Then the United States would be prepared to discuss removing the missiles from Turkey. “We’re not going to get these weapons out of Cuba unless . . . we’re going . . . to take our weapons out of Turkey . . . now that he made that public,” Kennedy told the ExCOM. Thompson and McCone disagreed. Thompson thought the public proposal on Turkey was a way of pressuring Kennedy to accept the private proposal on exchanging the dismantling of the missiles for a non-invasion pledge, and McCone believed that “the important thing for Khrushchev . . . to say” was: “I saved Cuba.”
At eight in the evening, after additional discussions at the ExCOM meeting, Kennedy replied to Khrushchev in a letter that put aside the Turkish question. He welcomed Khrushchev’s desire for a prompt solution and stated his willingness not to invade Cuba and to end the quarantine if Khrushchev dismantled the missiles and returned them to Russia. Kennedy hoped this could be done in a couple of days, when they could begin having broader arms control discussions.