Kennedy: The Classic Biography (122 page)

He knew the Chinese would soon threaten again, in India or elsewhere. “These Chinese are tough,” he remarked in one off-the-record session. “It isn’t just what they say about us but what they say about the Russians. They are in the Stalinist phase, believe in class war and the use of force, and seem prepared to sacrifice 300 million people if necessary to dominate Asia.” He read all he could about the Chinese (at times enjoying streaks of quoting pertinent and impertinent ancient Chinese maxims). But since the day of his inauguration the Red Chinese—unlike the Soviets—had spewed unremitting vituperation upon him. He saw no way of persuading them to abandon their aggressive design short of a patient, persistent American presence in Asia and the Pacific. Consequently, even if Red China had not become an emotional and political issue in the United States, he said, any American initiative now toward negotiations, diplomatic recognition or UN admission would be regarded as rewarding aggression. He was prepared to use whatever means were available to prevent the seating of Red China in Nationalist China’s seat at the UN.

Nevertheless he felt dissatisfied with his administration’s failure to break new ground in this area, asked the State Department to consider possible new steps and did not regard as magical or permanent this country’s long-standing policy of rigidity. “We are not wedded to a policy of hostility to Red China,” he said.

I would hope that… the normalization of relations…peaceful relations…between China and the West…would be brought about. We desire peace and we desire to live in amity with the Chinese people…. But it takes two to make peace, and I am hopeful that the Chinese will be persuaded that a peaceful existence with its neighbors represents the best hope for us all.

His efforts in Southeast Asia and his approach to the Soviets were designed to aid that persuasion. He hoped that the passage of time, an evolution among Red China’s leaders, their isolation from the rest of the world, their mounting internal problems and their inability to gain through aggression would be persuasive as well. But the bulk of any new effort on his part, he thought, would require a friendlier Congress and more public understanding. In the meantime, an “open door” was to be maintained on the possibilities of improved relations. The success of his wheat sales to Russia caused him to speculate whether grain or food donations to the Chinese might be a possibility. “If it would lessen their malevolence, I’d be for it,” he had said earlier. But he was persuaded that no guarantees could be obtained to prevent the reshipment of that food or grain, to assure its reaching those most in need or to enable the Chinese people to know who had sent it. “And let’s face it,” he said to me half in humor and half in despair, “that’s a subject for the second term.”

1
Lying across the air and sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian oceans, it had served as a staging area in World War II for Japanese attacks on the Philippines.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE CONFRONTATION IN CUBA

O
N SEPTEMBER
6, 1962, in response to his urgent telephone request and after checking with President Kennedy, I met with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin at the Russian Embassy. Two weeks earlier, in one of a series of get-acquainted luncheons Dobrynin held for administration officials, I had sought to dispel any Soviet assumption that the upcoming Congressional campaign would inhibit the President’s response to any new pressures on Berlin. His report of that conversation, the Ambassador now told me, had resulted in a personal message from Chairman Khrushchev on which he suggested I take notes as he read in order to convey it precisely to the President:

Nothing will be undertaken before the American Congressional elections that could complicate the international situation or aggravate the tension in the relations between our two countries…provided there are no actions taken on the other side which would change the situation. This includes a German peace settlement and West Berlin…. If the necessity arises for [the Chairman to address the United Nations], this would be possible only in the second half of November. The Chairman does not wish to become Involved in your internal political affairs.

The Chairman’s message, I replied (as the President had suggested), seemed both hollow and tardy. The late summer shipments of Soviet personnel, arms and equipment into Cuba had already aggravated world tensions and caused turmoil in our internal political affairs. As reported in my memorandum on the conversation dictated that same afternoon:

Dobrynin said that he would report this conversation in full to the Chairman and that he was aware himself of the political and press excitement regarding this matter. He neither contradicted nor confirmed my reference to large numbers of Soviet military personnel, electronic equipment and missile preparations. He repeated several times, however, that they had done nothing new or extraordinary in Cuba—that the events causing all the excitement had been taking place somewhat gradually and quietly over a long period of time—and that he stood by his assurances that all these steps were defensive in nature and did not represent any threat to the security of the United States.

At the time the Ambassador was speaking, forty-two Soviet medium-and intermediate-range ballistic missiles—each one capable of striking the United States with a nuclear warhead twenty or thirty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb—were en route to Cuba. Judging from the rapidity with which they were assembled, the planning and preparations for this move had been under way within the Soviet Union since spring and within Cuba all summer. The sites had been selected and surveyed, the protective antiaircraft missiles moved in, the roads improved and the local inhabitants evicted. Yet the reassurances given me by Dobrynin on September 6 were identical to those he gave to the Attorney General and others in the same period (presumably but not necessarily with knowledge of the actual facts). A Soviet Government statement on September 11 said flatly that its nuclear rockets were so powerful that there was no need to locate them in any other country, specifically mentioning Cuba, and that “the armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes” and could not threaten the United States. Khrushchev and Mikoyan told Georgi Bolshakov—the Soviet official in Washington through whom the Khrushchev letters had first arrived and who enjoyed friendly relations with several New Frontiersmen—to relay word that no missile capable of reaching the United States would be placed in Cuba. The message could not have been more precise—or more false.

The President was not lulled by these statements. (The Bolshakov message, in fact, reached him after he knew of the missiles’ existence.) Over one hundred voyages to Cuban ports by Communist bloc and bloc-chartered vessels in July and August had caused him to pay close attention to the aerial photography, agent reports and other intelligence data on Cuba. But the principal concern inside the government, as reflected in my August 23 luncheon conversation with Dobrynin, had been the possibility of a new Soviet move on West Berlin. With Khrushchev’s post-Sputnik offensive failing, with neither his pressures nor negotiations on Berlin getting anywhere, a new and dangerous confrontation seemed likely; and these suspicions were heightened by the report that Khrushchev had told Robert Frost, when the aged poet visited the Soviet Union in September, that democracies were “too liberal” to fight. All thought he meant Berlin; and with Berlin chiefly in mind the President had obtained a Congressional renewal of his authority to call up Reservists. “If we solve the Berlin problem without war,” he said to me one evening, outlining the tack I should take with a columnist, “Cuba will look pretty small. And if there is a war, Cuba won’t matter much either.”

The movement of Soviet personnel and equipment into Cuba, however, had been the subject of a series of meetings and reports in the White House beginning in August. Naval ships and planes photographed every Soviet vessel bound for Cuba. Aerial reconnaissance flights covered the entire island twice monthly. A special daily intelligence report on Cuba began on August 27.

The intelligence picture was clouded by the constant rumors reported to the CIA, to the press and to some members of Congress by Cuban refugees that Soviet surface-to-surface missiles had been seen on the island. All these rumors and reports, numbering in the hundreds, were checked out. All proved to be unfounded, resulting from the inability of civilians to distinguish between offensive and defensive missiles or the wishful thinking of patriots hoping to goad the United States into an invasion of Cuba. (Those missiles later discovered were not those discussed in all these reports and were fully observable only through aerial photography.) Refugee reports of Soviet missiles on the island had, in fact, begun well before Cuba in 1960 started receiving any Soviet arms of any kind.

But these and other reports were used by Senators Keating, Cape-hart, Thurmond, Goldwater and others to inflame the domestic political scene and to call for an invasion, a blockade or unspecified “action.” Ever since the Bay of Pigs, Cuba had been the Kennedy administration’s heaviest political cross; and the approach of the 1962 Congressional elections had encouraged further exacerbation of the issue. The administration—though readying a plan of military action in the knowledge that an internal revolt, a Berlin grab or some other action might someday require it—had been stressing since early 1961 the more positive and indirect approach of isolating Castro from a developing, democratic Latin America. An Organization of American States (OAS) Conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in January, 1962, had declared that the present government of Cuba was incompatible with the inter-American system, excluded it from participation in the OAS, prohibited OAS members from selling it arms, and adopted resolutions for collective defense against Communist penetration of the hemisphere. The United States had placed an embargo on all exports to Cuba other than food and medicines, prohibited importers and tourists from bringing in goods of Cuban origin, and restricted the use of American ports and ships by those engaged in Cuba bloc trade. These actions, and others under way, had hurt Castro’s economy, his prestige and his attempts to subvert his neighbors. But they had not removed him—and this was the political Achilles’ heel at which the President’s opponents aimed.

The Republican Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees announced that Cuba would be “the dominant issue of the 1962 campaign.” The public opinion polls showed growing frustration over Communist influence on that island. Senator Keating talked of Soviet troops and then of offensive missile bases at a time when no credible, verifiable proof existed of either. His information later proved inaccurate in important respects, but his refusal to reveal his sources of information made it impossible for the CIA to check their accuracy. As the President would later comment at a news conference, “We cannot base the issue of war and peace on a rumor or report which is not substantiated, or which some member of Congress refuses to tell us where he heard it…. To persuade our allies to come with us, to hazard…the security…as well as the peace of the free world, we have to move with hard intelligence.” Still concerned about West Berlin, he opposed an invasion of Cuba at his August 29 news conference, stressing “the totality of our obligations,” but he promised “to watch what happens in Cuba with the closest attention.”

Photographs taken that same day, and reported to the President on August 31, provided the first significant “hard intelligence”: antiaircraft surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), missile-equipped torpedo boats for coastal defense and substantially more military personnel. But neither these pictures nor those taken on September 5 (which also revealed MIG-21 fighter aircraft) produced evidence of offensive ballistic missiles, for which in fact no recognizable equipment had yet arrived. In a public statement on September 4 revealing the August 31 findings, the President repeated that there was as yet no proof of offensive ground-to-ground missiles or other significant offensive capability. He added, however: “Were it to be otherwise, the gravest issues would arise.”

With the exception of CIA Chief John McCone, who speculated that the SAM sites might be intended to protect offensive missile installations, but whose absence on a honeymoon prevented his views from reaching the President, Kennedy’s intelligence and Kremlinology experts stressed that no offensive Soviet missiles had ever been stationed outside of Soviet territory, not even in Eastern Europe, where they could be constantly guarded and supplied; that the Soviets would in all likelihood continue to limit their military assistance to Cuba to defensive weapons; and that they evidently recognized that the development of an
offensive
military base in Cuba might provoke U.S. military intervention. This distinction between offensive and defensive capabilities, while not always clear-cut, was regarded as crucial by all concerned. The presence in Cuba of Soviet weapons incapable of attacking the United States was obnoxious but not sufficiently different from the situation which had long existed in Cuba and elsewhere to justify a military response on our part.

Continued Soviet shipments and the belligerent Moscow statement of September 11, however, impelled the President to deliver an even more explicit statement at his September 13 news conference. He was still concerned about the possibility that Khrushchev hoped to provoke him into another entanglement in Cuba which would make a martyr out of Castro and wreck our Latin-American relations while the Soviets moved in on West Berlin. He refused to give in to the war hawks in the Congress and press (and a few in the Pentagon) who wanted to drag this country into a needless, irresponsible war without allies against a tiny nation which had not yet proven to be a serious threat to this country. He paid no more attention to Soviet assurances about defensive missiles than he did to refugee claims about offensive missiles—both were subject to proof and the proof as yet was not present. But he thought it important that both the American public and the Kremlin leaders understand distinctly what was and was not tolerable in the way of Soviet aid to Cuba. After a series of meetings at the White House, he had decided upon a precise warning to the Soviets not to permit their Cuban build-up to achieve serious proportions. Striking out at “loose talk” about an American invasion which could only “give a thin color of legitimacy to the Communist pretense that such a threat exists,” he underlined once again the difference between offensive and defensive capabilities: