An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (91 page)

Fearful that implementation of plans for a naval base would be quickly detected by U.S. intelligence and would stimulate a military response, Khrushchev canceled the deployment of surface ships and nuclear-armed submarines to Cuba. Instead, he approved the transit by ship of a squadron of light bombers and six short-range Luna missiles with their nuclear bombs. He also authorized a draft order to his Cuban commander to decide whether to use nuclear weapons in response to a U.S. invasion if communications with Moscow were lost. Khrushchev did not sign the order, however, but he kept it ready for possible future implementation.

On October 1, McNamara and the Joint Chiefs received disturbing information about offensive weapons in Cuba. On September 21, the Defense Intelligence Agency had learned of “a first-hand sighting on September 12 of a truck convoy of 20 objects 65 to 70 feet long which resembled large missiles.” The convoy had “turned into an airport on the southwest edge of Havana.” Because early reports of a similar nature had proved false, the DIA described the information as only “potentially significant.” However, photographs received in the last week of September and reports of surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites produced “a hypothesis that MRBM [medium-range ballistic missile] sites were under preparation in Pinar del Rio province.”

High-altitude U-2 reconnaissance flights were essential to confirm the report. But concern that Soviet SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles might shoot down a U-2 made such surveillance risky. Detection on August 30 of a U-2 over Soviet airspace and the loss of a Taiwanese U-2 on September 8 to a Chinese missile had produced a temporary suspension of such flights over Cuba. But the CIA warned that the SA-2s might be guarding other missile installations in western Cuba and argued that whatever the risks, U-2 flights were called for. “Don’t you ever let . . . up?” Rusk asked the CIA’s representative at a September 10 White House meeting. “How do you expect me to negotiate on Berlin with all these incidents?” But Bobby believed that the stakes were too high for them to avoid the risk. “What’s the matter, Dean,” he asked, “no guts?”

On October 5, Bundy and McCone argued for U-2 flights directly over Cuba. McCone believed that the existence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba was “a probability rather than a mere possibility,” but Bundy held to the conviction that “the Soviets would not go that far.” The same day, Bolshakov carried another message to Bobby from Khrushchev: “The weapons that the USSR is sending to Cuba will only be of a defensive character.”

But the reported possible MRBM sites at San Cristobal in Pinar del Río settled the argument. On October 9, Kennedy approved a U-2 mission to take place as soon as weather permitted. Clear visibility up to seventy-four thousand feet, the U-2’s altitude, did not occur until October 14. In the meantime, on October 10, Keating publicly announced that he had evidence of six IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile) sites in Cuba. The IRBMs, which could reach targets twenty-one hundred miles away, had twice the range of MRBMs. On the thirteenth, in a conversation with Chet Bowles, who had been a roving ambassador since November 1961, Dobrynin had “expressed worry and surprise at the intensity of U.S. public reaction” over Cuba. He gave Bowles fresh assurances that “in spite of [their] worries, the U.S.S.R. was not shipping offensive weapons and well understood the dangers of doing so.”

If Keating, whom Kennedy referred to as a “nut,” was posturing for political gain in the rapidly approaching elections, the White House had to have a more effective refutation than Khrushchev’s word or the likelihood that Moscow would not be so rash. To blunt Republican accusations of a passive White House, the administration leaked details of Operation Mongoose to James Reston, which he used in a column. But on the off chance that missile sites were going up and that Keating was right, the administration needed to face hard choices on how to eliminate them.

To Kennedy’s distress, the October 14 U-2 flight over the island, which lasted six minutes and produced 928 photographs, revealed conclusive evidence of offensive weapons: three medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction; one additional MRBM site discovered at San Cristobal; and two IRBM sites at Guanajay. The photos also revealed twenty-one crated IL-28 medium-range bombers capable of delivering nuclear bombs. The CIA’s report on the discoveries reached Bundy on the evening of October 15, but he decided to wait until morning to present this “very big news” to the president, when enlargements of the photographs would be available. Besides, it seemed to him that a late-night meeting, which might attract attention, would be a bad idea. “It was a hell of a secret,” and it needed to remain such until the president could consider how to deal with it. Also, a rested president, who was returning from a strenuous week of campaigning for congressional Democrats, would be better prepared to confront the crisis than an exhausted one. Nevertheless, Bundy shared the news, which CIA chiefs already had, with Rusk and McNamara and a few of their deputies on the evening of the fifteenth.

At 8:45 on the morning of the sixteenth, Bundy brought the bad news to Kennedy in his bedroom. The president ordered Bundy to set up a White House meeting in the Cabinet Room before noon and ticked off the names of the national security officials he wanted there. He then called Bobby, who had been first on his list. “We have some big trouble. I want you over here,” the president told him. Determined not to create a public crisis and demands for press comments before he had had a chance to consider his options, Kennedy kept his early-morning appointments.

After twenty-one months in the White House, the Kennedys were not strangers to “big trouble.” The Bay of Pigs, Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, the Congo, the Freedom Riders, the clash with big steel, Soviet nuclear tests, and, most recently, the September crisis in Mississippi had schooled them in the strains of holding power. But this was worse than anything they had seen before. Indeed, no president or administration had confronted so much danger to the national survival since Roosevelt had led the country through the Second World War. True, Truman and Eisenhower had shouldered Cold War burdens in every corner of the globe, and Truman had presided over a frustrating conflict in Korea, which had cost some twenty-five thousand American lives. But Soviet missiles in Cuba were an unprecedented provocation—a challenge to American national security that threatened to bring on a nuclear war. And on a more trivial but still potent note, if Kennedy failed to remove them by negotiation or force, he assumed that a successor would come to power on the promise that he would.

Although the Kennedys did not have the luxury to reflect on how they had come to this confrontation with Moscow, the question could not have been far from their minds. Obviously Castro deserved some of the blame. His determination to train Latin American radicals committed to subverting as many hemisphere governments as possible provoked the Kennedy White House into counteractions. This ongoing crisis in U.S.-Cuban relations presented Khrushchev with an irresistible opportunity. By putting missiles on the island, he could achieve several objectives: reduce the Soviet missile gap with the United States; possibly compel a German settlement more compatible with Moscow’s security needs than just a wall ending the embarrassing flight of refugees from East to West; outshine China in competition for Third World hearts and minds; and boost his standing at home, where his state-managed economy had failed to deliver the goods. Of course, the Kennedys could not dismiss an American share of responsibility for the crisis. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, Operation Mongoose, and exaggerated fears of communist takeovers in Latin America, which, for all the rhetoric of good intentions, made the United States more an advocate of the status quo than a supporter of democratic change, had all contributed to the hemisphere tensions that drove Castro firmly into the Soviet camp.

THE FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS
was not to assign blame for the Soviet-American confrontation but to find some way to eliminate the missiles and avert a nuclear war. At 11:45
A.M.
, thirteen men joined the president in the Cabinet Room for an hour-and-ten-minute discussion. The group came to be called Ex Comm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Kennedy sat in the center of an oblong table, with Rusk, Ball, and Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson to his immediate right and McNamara, Gilpatric, Joint Chiefs chairman Maxwell Taylor, and acting CIA director Marshall Carter (McCone was at a family funeral) to his immediate left. Bundy, Dillon, Bobby, and Johnson sat across from the president. Two experts on aerial photography, Arthur Lundahl and Sidney Graybeal, briefed the group on the U-2 photos, which were propped on easels. Though Ex Comm would create the impression that Kennedy governed by committee, it was in fact the exception. Though he had appointed the most talented people he could find to his cabinet, for example, he had made almost no use of cabinet meetings in deciding major questions. Instead, consultations with a variety of individuals, including cabinet officers, before initiating policy had been his modus operandi. Regular formal cabinet discussions were never a significant part of his decision-making process.

As the Ex Comm discussion began, Kennedy activated the Cabinet Room tape recorder. After the experts presented the evidence of medium-range ballistic missile sites, Kennedy wanted to know if the missiles were ready to be launched. When told no, he asked how long before they could be fired. No one could be sure, but, McNamara said, “there is some reason to believe that the warheads aren’t present and hence they are not ready to fire.” The question of “readiness to fire” is “highly critical in forming our plans,” McNamara added. Consequently, Kennedy agreed that additional U-2 flights were essential to discover where nuclear warheads might be stored and when the Soviets might be able to use them.

Kennedy wanted his advisers to explain, if they could, why Khrushchev was doing this. Perhaps it would give him a better idea of how to respond. “What is the advantage?” Kennedy asked. “Must be some major reason for the Soviets to set this up.” He answered his own question: “Must be that they’re not satisfied with their ICBMs.” Taylor echoed the president’s view: “What it’d give them is, primarily . . . [a] launching base for short-range missiles against the United States to supplement their rather defective ICBM system. . . . That’s one reason.” Citing McCone, Rusk said that Khrushchev might be animated by concerns about our nuclear superiority. Rusk also believed that “Berlin is very much involved in this.” Khrushchev may be hoping to “bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other,” he said, or use a U.S. attack on Cuba as an excuse to act against Berlin.

The principal focus of the meeting was on how to eliminate the missiles from Cuba. Rusk thought that they could do it by a “sudden, unannounced strike of some sort,” or by a political track in which they built up the crisis “to the point where the other side has to consider very seriously about giving in.” Perhaps they could talk sense to Castro through an intermediary, Rusk suggested. “It ought to be said to Castro that this kind of a base is intolerable. . . . The time has now come when he must, in the interests of the Cuban people . . . break cleanly with the Soviet Union and prevent this missile base from becoming operational.” The alternative to the quick strike, Rusk said, was “to alert our allies and Mr. Khrushchev that there is an utterly serious crisis in the making here. . . . We’ll be facing a situation that could well lead to a general war. . . . We have an obligation to do what has to be done, but to do it in a way that gives everybody a chance to pull away from it before it gets too hard.”

For the moment, Kennedy was not thinking about any political or diplomatic solution; his focus was on military options and how to mute the crisis until they had some clear idea of what to do. He saw four possible military actions: an air strike against the missile installations; a more general air attack against a wide array of targets; a blockade; and an invasion. He wanted preparations for the second, third, and fourth possibilities, decisions on which could come later. But “we’re certainly going to do number one,” he said. “We’re going to take out these missiles.” Just when, he did not say, but he wanted knowledge of the missiles limited to as few officials as possible. He believed that the news would leak anyway in two or three days. But even when it became known, he wanted policy decisions to remain secret. “Otherwise,” he said, “we bitch it up.”

He scheduled another Ex Comm meeting for 6:30 that evening. Again to avoid any hint of crisis, he followed his prearranged afternoon schedule. The only public indication of his concern came in ad lib remarks to journalists attending a State Department conference. “The United States, and the world, is now passing through one of its most critical periods,” he said. “Our major problem over all, is the survival of our country . . . without the beginning of the third and perhaps the last war.” He reflected his sense of burden and irritation with people in the press and Congress who were second-guessing him by reciting a verse: “Bullfight critics row on row/Crowd the enormous plaza full/But only one is there who knows/And he is the one who fights the bull.”

The evening meeting included the morning’s participants as well as Sorensen and Edwin Martin, a State Department expert on Latin America. Kennedy came back to his puzzlement over Khrushchev’s actions. Khrushchev had, all things considered, been cautious over Berlin, so how did the Russian experts explain his willingness to risk a war by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, especially if, as some believed, it did not reduce America’s military advantage over the USSR? “Well, it’s a goddamn mystery to me,” Kennedy admitted. “I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin blockade where the Russians have given so clear a provocation, I don’t know when it’s been, because they’ve been awfully cautious, really.”