An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (94 page)

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 compelled 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.”

Yet Kennedy was doubtful that U Thant’s initiative would come to much. On the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, he watched a televised confrontation at the U.N. between Stevenson and Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin. When Stevenson pressed Zorin to say whether the Soviets had put offensive missiles in Cuba, he replied, “I am not in an American courtroom, and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which a prosecutor puts questions.” Stevenson would not let him evade the question. “You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no,” Stevenson shot back. “You will have your answer in due course,” Zorin answered. “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over,” Stevenson said. He then embarrassed the Russians by putting U-2 photos of the missiles before the Security Council. “I never knew Adlai had it in him,” Kennedy said of his performance. “Too bad he didn’t show some of this steam in the 1956 campaign.”

To make clear that he was not backing away from the quarantine while they waited for Khrushchev’s answer to U Thant, Kennedy authorized the boarding of a Soviet-chartered Lebanese ship on the morning of October 26. Since it was not a Soviet ship per se and since the boarding went off without incident, the White House had not jeopardized U Thant’s proposal. But Kennedy had sent a message.

At the Ex Comm meeting at 10:00
A.M.
on the twenty-sixth, it was clear that the quarantine was no longer the central issue. There were no ships close to the quarantine line; nor did they expect any “quarantine activity with respect to Soviet ships . . . in the next few days.” The concern now was the continuing missile buildup in Cuba. “Even if the quarantine’s 100 percent effective,” Kennedy said, “it isn’t any good because the missile sites go on being constructed.” And time was running out on a peaceful solution to that problem: “We can’t screw around for two weeks and wait for them [the Soviets] to finish these [missile bases],” he declared. Moreover, he saw only “two ways of removing the weapons. One is to negotiate them out. Or the other is to go in and take them out. I don’t see any other way you’re going to get the weapons out.” Nor was he convinced that negotiations would work. He anticipated using an air strike followed by an invasion, which would risk Soviet use of the missiles against U.S. territory. He told Macmillan that evening, “If at the end of 48 hours we are getting no place, and the missile sites continue to be constructed, then we are going to be faced with some hard decisions.”