An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (92 page)

Ball, Bundy, and Alex Johnson saw the Soviets as trying to expand their strategic capabilities. But McNamara was not so sure. The Joint Chiefs thought the Soviet missile deployments “substantially” changed the strategic balance, but McNamara believed it made no difference. Taylor acknowledged that the missiles in Cuba meant “just a few more missiles targeted on the United States,” but he considered them “a very, a rather important, adjunct and reinforcement” to Moscow’s “strike capability.”

Kennedy saw other reasons for eliminating them. If the United States left them in place, it would be an inducement for the Soviets to add ever greater strength to their forces in Cuba. In addition, it would make the Cubans, he added, “look like they’re coequal with us.” Besides, he said, “We weren’t going to [allow it]. Last month I should have said that we don’t care. But when we said we’re not going to [allow it], and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing, then I would think that our risks increase. . . . What difference does it make? They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway.” But more was at stake here than matters of strategic balance. “After all, this is a political struggle as much as military,” he said.

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINED,
then, was how to remove the missiles without a full-scale war. Despite his earlier certainty, Kennedy had begun to have doubts about a surprise air strike and may already have ruled this out as a sensible option. When he asked at the morning meeting, “How effective can the take-out be?” Taylor had answered, “It’ll never be 100 percent, Mr. President, we know. We hope to take out the vast majority in the first strike, but this is not just one thing—one strike, one day—but continuous air attack for whenever necessary, whenever we discover a target.” Kennedy picked up on the uncertain results of such an operation: “Well, let’s say we just take out the missile bases,” he said. “Then they have some more there. Obviously they can get them in by submarine and so on. I don’t know whether you just keep high strikes on.”

Bobby, who had been so eager for clandestine action, doubted the wisdom of air attacks, which he had described in the morning discussion as likely “to kill an awful lot of people.” It was one thing to have professional spies and devoted Cuban opponents risk their lives to topple a communist regime in Cuba. But killing possibly hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, including surely some innocent civilians, chilled him. At the evening meeting, he passed a note to Sorensen: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”

It seems possible, even likely, that Bobby was reflecting his brother’s views. Bobby was not given to freelancing; he was his brother’s spokesman on most matters. In this early stage of the discussions about what to do, it would have made Kennedy seem weak to shy away openly from air raids for fear they might not work well or would claim some innocent victims. He surely had not ruled out the possibility, and absent another good solution he could imagine using air power to eliminate the missile sites. However, he was reluctant to follow that option. (When Soviet expert Charles Bohlen, who was leaving for Paris to become ambassador, wrote a memo advocating an ultimatum before any air strikes, Kennedy asked him to stay in Washington to participate in the deliberations. But concern that a delayed departure might alert the press to the crisis persuaded JFK to let him go.) Kennedy may also have tipped his bias against a quick air attack by telling Acheson that a U.S. bombing raid would be “Pearl Harbor in reverse.” (Refusing to compare air raids on the missile sites to an unprovoked sneak attack, Acheson told the president, “It is unworthy of you to speak that way.”)

The only new idea put forth at the evening meeting came from McNamara. He suggested a middle ground between the military and political courses they had been discussing. He proposed a “declaration of open surveillance: a statement that we would immediately impose a blockade against offensive weapons entering Cuba in the future, and an indication that, with our open surveillance reconnaissance, which we would plan to maintain indefinitely for the future, we would be prepared to immediately attack the Soviet Union in the event that Cuba made any offensive move against this country.”

After a long day of discussions, Kennedy was no closer to a firm decision on how to proceed. On Wednesday, the seventeenth, while he continued to hide the crisis from public view by meeting with West Germany’s foreign minister, eating lunch with Libya’s crown prince, and flying to Connecticut to campaign for Democratic candidates, his advisers held nonstop meetings. But first he saw McCone, who had returned to Washington, at 9:30 in the morning. The CIA director gained the impression that Kennedy was “inclined to act promptly if at all, without warning, targeting on MRBMs and possible airfields.” McCone may have been hearing what he wanted to hear, or, more likely, Kennedy created this impression by inviting McCone to make the case for prompt air strikes.

As part of his balancing act, Kennedy invited Adlai Stevenson into the discussion. After learning about the crisis from the president, who showed him the missile photos on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Stevenson predictably urged Kennedy not to rush into military action. When Kennedy said, “I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render the weapons inoperable,” Stevenson replied, “Let’s not go into an air strike until we have explored the possibilities of a peaceful solution.”

The next day, before he returned to the U.N. in New York, Stevenson wrote a letter urging the president to send personal emissaries to see Castro and Khrushchev. He predicted that an attack would bring Soviet reprisals in Turkey or Berlin and would “risk starting a nuclear war [which] is bound to be divisive at best and the judgments of history seldom coincide with the tempers of the moment.” Stevenson’s appeal to take the long view was not lost on Kennedy, who understood that his actions could permanently alter the course of human affairs. To underscore his point, Stevenson added: “I know your dilemma is to strike before the sites are operational or to risk waiting until a proper groundwork of justification can be prepared. The national security must come first.
But the means adopted have such incalculable consequences that I feel you should have made it clear that the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is
negotiable
before we start anything.
” This was not a counsel of defeat, Stevenson concluded. The Soviets needed to be told “that it is they who have upset the precarious balance in the world in arrogant disregard of your warnings—by threats against Berlin and now from Cuba—and that we have no choice except to restore the balance, i.e., blackmail and intimidation
never,
negotiation and sanity
always
.”

The differences between McCone and Stevenson were repeated in various forms during discussions among Kennedy’s advisers on the seventeenth. At midnight, after three long meetings, Bobby summarized five options that advisers were putting before the president: (1) on October 24, after a week’s military preparation and notification to Western European and some Latin American leaders, bomb the MRBMs and send Khrushchev a message of explanation—Rusk opposed this plan; (2) attack the MRBMs after notifying Khrushchev—defense chiefs opposed this proposal; (3) inform Moscow about our knowledge of the missiles and our determination to block additional ones from entering Cuba, declare war, and prepare an invasion—Rusk and Ball favored this option but wanted it preceded by surveillance without air strikes; (4) engage in “political preliminaries” followed by extensive air attacks with preparations for an invasion; and (5) the “same as 4, but omit the political preliminaries.”

When Ex Comm met again on Thursday morning, October 18, additional reconnaissance photos revealed construction of IRBM launching pads. They had now discovered five different missile sites. McCone reported that the Soviets could have between sixteen and thirty-two missiles ready to fire “within a week or slightly more.” Concerned about convincing the world of the accuracy of their information, Kennedy wanted to know if an untrained observer would see what the experts saw in the photos. Lundahl doubted it. “I think the uninitiated would like to see the missile, in the tube,” he said.

Sensing the president’s hesitancy about quick action without clear evidence to convince the world of its necessity, Rusk asked whether the group thought it “necessary to take action.” He believed it essential. The Soviets were turning Cuba into “a powerful military problem” for the United States, he said, and a failure to respond would “undermine our alliances all over the world.” Inaction would also encourage Moscow to feel free to intervene wherever they liked and would create an unmanageable problem in sustaining domestic support for the country’s foreign policy commitments. Rusk then read a letter from Bohlen urging diplomatic action as a prelude to military steps. An attack on Cuba without a prior effort at diplomatic pressure to remove the missiles, Bohlen said, would alienate all America’s allies, give Moscow credibility for a response against Berlin, and “greatly increase the probability of general war.”

Bohlen’s argument echoed Kennedy’s thinking. People saw the United States as “slightly demented” about Cuba, the president said. “No matter how good our films are . . . a lot of people would regard this [military action] as a mad act by the United States.” They would see it as “a loss of nerve because they will argue that taken at its worst, the presence of those missiles really doesn’t change the [military] balance.”

But the evidence of additional missile sites had convinced the Joint Chiefs to urge a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Kennedy stubbornly resisted. “Nobody knows what kind of success we’re going to have with this invasion,” he said. “Invasions are tough, hazardous. We’ve got a lot of equipment, a lot of—thousands of—Americans get killed in Cuba, and I think you’re in much more of a mess than you are if you take out these . . . bases.” And if Bobby’s opinion remained a reflection of his brother’s thinking, Kennedy also opposed unannounced air strikes. Ball made what Bobby called “a hell of a good point.” “If we act without warning,” Ball said, “without giving Khrushchev some way out . . . that’s like Pearl Harbor. It’s the kind of conduct that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.” The way we act, Bobby asserted, speaks to “the whole question of . . . what kind of a country we are.” Ball saw surprise air strikes as comparable to “carrying the mark of Cain on your brow for the rest of your life.” Bobby echoed the point: “We’ve fought for 15 years with Russia to prevent a first strike against us. Now . . . we do that to a small country. I think it is a hell of a burden to carry.”

KENNEDY HAD NOT RULED OUT
military action, but his remarks at the meetings on October 18 revealed a preference for a blockade and negotiations. He wanted to know what would be the best way to open talks with Khrushchev—through a cable, a personal envoy? He also asked, if we established a blockade of Cuba, what would we do about the missiles already there, and would we need to declare war on Havana? Llewellyn Thompson, who had joined the Thursday morning discussion, addressed Kennedy’s first concern by suggesting Kennedy press Khrushchev to dismantle the existing missile sites and warn him that if they were armed, our constant surveillance would alert us, and we would eliminate them. As for a declaration of war, Kennedy thought it would be unwise: “It seems to me that with a declaration of war our objective would be an invasion.”

To keep up the facade of normality, Kennedy followed his regular schedule for the rest of the day, including a two-hour meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko. Nothing was said about the offensive missiles by Gromyko or Kennedy. But they gave each other indirect messages. Gromyko ploddingly read a prepared statement. He emphasized that they were giving Cuba “armaments which were only defensive—and he wished to stress the word defensive—in character.” After the meeting, Kennedy told Bob Lovett about Gromyko, “who, in this very room not over ten minutes ago, told more barefaced lies than I have ever heard in so short a time. All during his denial that the Russians had any missiles or weapons, or anything else, in Cuba, I had the . . . pictures in the center drawer of my desk, and it was an enormous temptation to show them to him.” Instead, Kennedy told Gromyko that the Soviet arms shipments had created “the most dangerous situation since the end of the war.”

Whatever hints Kennedy offered, Gromyko missed them. He noticed that Rusk was red “like a crab” and unusually emotional, and Kennedy was more deliberate than usual. Eager to believe that they were outwitting Kennedy, Gromyko advised Khrushchev that “the situation is in general wholly satisfactory.”

Lovett’s advice to Kennedy was similar to McNamara’s: Establish a blockade around Cuba. If it failed, air strikes and an invasion could follow, but a blockade might persuade the Russians to withdraw the missiles and avoid bloodshed. It would also insulate the United States from charges of being “trigger-happy.” When Bobby entered the room, the president asked Lovett to repeat what he was saying. When he did, Bobby agreed with the wisdom of “taking a less violent step at the outset, because, as he said, we could always blow the place up if necessary, but that might be unnecessary, and then we would be in the position of having used too much force.”

Kennedy reconvened his advisers at a secret late-night meeting on the second floor of the executive mansion. He wanted to hear the results of the day’s deliberations. Bundy now argued the case for doing nothing. He believed that any kind of action would bring a reprisal against Berlin, which would divide the NATO alliance. But Kennedy thought it was impossible to sit still. As he had said earlier in the day, “Somehow we’ve got to take some action. . . . Now, the question really is . . . what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.” They agreed that a blockade against Soviet shipments of additional offensive weapons would be the best starting point. Instead of air strikes or an invasion, which was tantamount to a state of war, they would try to resolve the crisis with “a limited blockade for a limited purpose.”