Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (38 page)

Like his brother, Bobby reflected the two poles of their thinking. They could not leave the missiles in place and they needed, both for the sake of America’s hemisphere and national security and the president’s domestic political standing, to get rid of Castro. At the same time, they believed that decisive action against Castro and the Soviets in Cuba could provoke a nuclear war that would produce global devastation and an end of the United States as they knew it.

Nonetheless, they felt compelled to give prime consideration to a military response. As the morning meeting ended and they made plans to reconvene that evening, Kennedy asked that the Joint Chiefs be there and that additional reconnaissance flights be scheduled promptly. It was evident to all that they had entered a grave crisis, which they remained eager to hide from the public by inconspicuously leaving the White House from the East Gate rather than the west entrance.

In the five hours before the group reconvened in the Cabinet Room, the participants worked to sort out the issues confronting them. Following lunch with Libya’s crown prince, Kennedy asked Adlai Stevenson, who had come down from New York, to join him in the White House living quarters, where he briefed him on the missiles. The choice, Kennedy told him, was between a military strike and finding some other means to remove the threat. Predictably, Stevenson urged against a precipitous attack that could close off a peaceful solution. Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy convened Mongoose planners at the Justice Department, chided them for having fallen so short in effective counters to Castro, and hinted that the president might be getting ready to unleash the U.S. military against Cuba. He emphasized the urgency of combating Castro’s threat by declaring his intention to hold daily half-hour meetings until he considered it no longer necessary.

McNamara met with the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon, where they dismissed the likelihood of a Soviet nuclear response to any U.S. action. They also pressed the case for comprehensive air raids that would not only eliminate the missile sites but also cripple Castro’s air force and anything else that posed a threat to U.S. territory. They viewed a “surgical strike against the MRBM sites alone” as posing an “unacceptable risk”; it would leave Castro free to use his air force against Florida’s coastal cities.

Kennedy was not ready to decide on any course of action yet, but the choices before him, as shown by what Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy were advising, seemed clear enough: precede military action with diplomatic and political initiatives to save the peace or strike quickly at the Soviet missile installations before they were fully operational and the Republicans could criticize the White House for having failed to preempt an increased communist threat to the country’s security. Each choice carried substantial risks: Discussions with the Soviets and Cubans would give them the chance to strengthen Cuba’s defenses against attacks and increase threats to Berlin or some other vulnerable Western target, while a surprise attack could lead to a wider war and all the catastrophic losses a nuclear conflict seemed certain to produce.

The same group of advisers, now including Ted Sorensen and Edward Martin, the State Department’s assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, met for an hour and twenty-five minutes in the Cabinet Room beginning at 6:30. Sorensen was present not for advice but in order to know what he might need to include in a speech. Marshall Carter reported that they now had U-2 photos showing that the Soviets were building sites for between sixteen and twenty-four MRBMs that could be ready to launch in two weeks or even sooner. Remembering his reticence in challenging the CIA before the Bay of Pigs operation, Bundy pressed for assurances that the CIA was not mistaken about what they were dealing with. Carter reaffirmed his assessment, and McNamara, who said that he had tried unsuccessfully to prove that this was a misreading of the evidence, supported Carter’s conclusion.

Rusk and Martin now weighed in with a proposal that Kennedy ask an intermediary to advise Castro that he was risking the destruction of his regime. Castro should also be told that the Soviets were playing him for a fool: They were ready to swap the missiles and his government for concessions on Berlin. Moreover, the emissary should hint that if Castro had trouble compelling the Soviets to dismantle the missile sites, the United States would be prepared to help him. Rusk acknowledged that any message to Castro might trigger strengthened defenses around the missiles rather than pressure on the Russians to retreat from installing offensive weapons. Rusk then warned that attacking the missiles might touch off upheavals in six Latin American countries with active communist parties. In addition, he predicted that Moscow would respond to any U.S. attack on Cuba with threats against NATO allies that would undermine the alliance unless the United States gave them advanced notice of military strikes against the missiles.

Unwilling to decide on a course of action yet, Kennedy offered no response to Rusk’s and Martin’s remarks. Instead, he asked what the Chiefs were proposing. McNamara and Taylor made clear that the Chiefs believed that a limited assault would provoke reprisal attacks on the United States. Only a full-scale air campaign, which would last five days, seemed the best option for ensuring the national security and would leave them time to decide whether an invasion should follow.

McNamara tried to blunt the Chiefs’ recommendation by suggesting that they first consider political steps, as Rusk had proposed. Nor was he persuaded by the Chiefs’ call for military action, which he warned would trigger a Soviet military response. It would require a partial mobilization in anticipation of what the Soviets might do. An invasion following air strikes would compel a large-scale mobilization and a declaration of national emergency. He saw an alternative between the Rusk and Chiefs proposals: a “declaration of open surveillance,” which meant imposing “a blockade against offensive weapons entering Cuba,” coupled with a warning that “we would be prepared to immediately attack the Soviet Union in the event that Cuba made any offensive move against this country.”

McNamara shared the existing belief that the best way to prevent a nuclear war was through deterrence or the understanding by Moscow that any attack on the United States would bring the virtual annihilation of the Soviet Union. However, early in his tenure as defense secretary, he had concluded that a nuclear conflict was simply impermissible. He had read a study Eisenhower had commissioned on nuclear conflict, which assumed that a war would destroy both sides. He then advised Kennedy that “the President never initiate, under any circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons.” His conversations with U.S. military chiefs about an all-out conflict had convinced him that their idea of unleashing America’s missiles and bombers against Russia was “just absurd.” It was clear to him from the start of the Cuban crisis that a military response was the prelude to a disaster.

Thinking out loud about the suggestions before him, Kennedy summarized the dilemma: He thought that publicly revealing the missile sites without attacking them would demonstrate restraint on the United States’ part and put the burden on the Soviets not to deepen the crisis. On the other hand, going public would foreclose a surprise air assault and make it more difficult to destroy the sites. Moreover, he didn’t think that Castro would “suddenly back down. I don’t think he plays it that way.” As for informing Khrushchev, Kennedy believed that he had already made clear to the Soviet leader his determination to prevent the installation of offensive weapons in Cuba. He saw justification in striking without a political overture: Khrushchev “initiated the danger, really hasn’t he?” he rhetorically asked. “He’s the one that’s playing God, not us.”

Kennedy’s hard line triggered discussion of a possible nuclear attack. Rusk and Bundy doubted that Khrushchev would be so reckless. Yet Kennedy was not so sure: “We certainly have been wrong about what he’s trying to do in Cuba,” he said. “Not many of us thought that he was going to put MRBMs on Cuba.” Because no one could say with any certainty what Khrushchev intended, Bundy thought the more important question was whether they actually needed to destroy the missiles: What is the real impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? he asked. How much does this change the strategic balance? McNamara replied that the Chiefs said, “Substantially.” His view, however, was “Not at all.” Most U.S. intelligence experts thought the ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba would give Moscow a military advantage, but had doubted that the Soviets would have been willing to risk the heightened tensions in relations with the United States. Taylor acknowledged that MRBMs in Cuba meant only “a few more missiles targeted on the United States” rather than some dramatic reduction in our security.

Everyone agreed, however, that it had political repercussions, although Kennedy thought it could lead to an even larger buildup in Cuba, which would create strategic concerns. Still, he didn’t believe it was the greater military threat that mattered: “It doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one from 90 miles away,” he said. “Geography doesn’t mean that much.” Nonetheless, it would give Khrushchev the ability “to squeeze us in Berlin” and use the missiles as leverage in Latin America: If we faced trouble in Venezuela and made noises about sending in troops, Bobby Kennedy predicted, Castro could threaten us with the missiles. “It makes them look like they’re co-equal with us,” the president observed. “They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway. . . . After all, this is a political struggle as much as military.”

Yet he could not discount the need to get the missiles out of Cuba. The question was how to do it. Kennedy rejected the Chiefs’ call for a large-scale air attack. It would create a “much more hazardous” crisis. Bundy agreed. He saw “political advantages . . . of the small strike. It corresponds to ‘the punishment fits the crime’ in political terms. We are doing only what we warned repeatedly and publicly we would have to do.” As for timing of any air assault, they agreed that it could happen in four or five days, on Saturday or Sunday.

McNamara didn’t think the timing and extent of an attack was as important as a discussion of its consequences. Taylor advised that the Chiefs might dig in their heels against a limited air strike: “they would prefer taking no action. . . . It’s opening up the United States to attacks which they can’t prevent.” Kennedy was not convinced: The larger attack they preferred would increase “the chances of it becoming a much broader struggle.” He feared “the dangers of the worldwide effect.”

Bobby Kennedy sided with the Chiefs. Unlike McNamara and Bundy, he focused not on the prospect of a nuclear war but the more narrow consequences for his brother. As was evident from his demands for more aggressive Mongoose action, he remained eager to bring down Castro and wash away the Bay of Pigs failure. Moreover, he was angry at being lied to by Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence officer at the Washington embassy, who had become the Kennedys’ back channel to Khrushchev. Bobby could imagine that Moscow had also deceived Bolshakov, an amiable, corpulent military bureaucrat who was little more than a go-between. But Khrushchev had directly told the president as well that there were no surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba. “It had all been lies, one gigantic fabric of lies,” Bobby later said. And so he assumed that even if they persuaded the Soviets to remove the missiles, there would be nothing to prevent them from building new missile sites in six months. He spoke in favor of a full-scale attack followed by an invasion that could end Castro’s regime and the prospect of a renewed threat. He said, “We should just get into it, and get it over with, and take our losses.” He suggested creating a provocation at Guantánamo “or whether there’s some ship that . . . you know sink the
Maine
again or something.”

On the surface, it seems like a reckless disregard for the sort of consequences that McNamara feared. But Bobby was largely reflecting his brother’s current outlook, though with the sort of vehemence that expressed the Kennedys’ determination to best opponents. The president did not want to come down clearly on any side of the argument—at least not yet—and used Bobby as a sounding board. He understood that if he made his judgment evident in a group meeting, it could close off discussion by advisers reluctant to challenge the president’s thinking. Yet when McCone talked to Kennedy privately on the morning of October 17, he had the impression that the president “leaned toward prompt military action” and instructed him to brief Eisenhower on developments. McCone reported that the ex-president was ready to “support any decisive military action.”

On Tuesday evening of the sixteenth, Kennedy had heard enough and ended his part in the meeting by asking his advisers to keep discussing alternatives until Thursday morning, when he planned to confer with them again. In the meantime, he would follow his announced schedule of a meeting at the White House with the German chancellor on Wednesday morning followed by a political visit to Connecticut to support Democratic congressional candidates. The public was still to be kept in the dark about the emerging crisis.

Kennedy’s determination to maintain a business-as-usual image carried over to a White House dinner in honor of Charles E. Bohlen before he went to Paris as ambassador. Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher and historian and a friend of Schlesinger’s, was one of the guests. Berlin recalled later that Kennedy “was very amiable, in a jolly mood, which was very extraordinary” on the day he had been alerted to the missiles in Cuba. “The sangfroid which he displayed, an extraordinary capacity for self-control on a day on which he must have been extraordinarily preoccupied, was one of the most astonishing exhibitions of self-restraint and strength of will which I think I’ve ever seen.”

After Kennedy left on the evening of the sixteenth, the advisers continued discussing the options. McNamara was the most outspoken and unambiguous. He believed it essential to consider more fully the consequences of the major alternatives. He decisively favored what he called “the political approach” or “a non-military action.” The missile sites presented Kennedy with “a domestic political problem,” not “a military problem.” The objective should be “to prevent their use.” And this could be done by daily twenty-four-hour surveillance and a “blockade” to prevent the import of any additional offensive weapons. McNamara proposed an announcement of an “ultimatum” to Khrushchev warning him that “if there is ever any indication they’re to be launched against this country, we will respond not
only
against Cuba, but we will respond directly against the Soviet Union with a full nuclear strike.”