Kennedy: The Classic Biography (130 page)

The big question was the big ocean. To us, Khrushchev appeared—in a harsh but rambling Soviet Government statement Tuesday morning rejecting the quarantine as “piracy,” in two private letters to Kennedy Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening (both answered within hours after their receipt with firm restatements of our position) and in his answers to appeals from Bertrand Russell and Acting Secretary General U Thant—to have been caught off balance, to be maneuvering, to be seeking a consensus among the top Kremlin rulers, uncertain whether to admit that the missiles were there in view of the widespread denunciations of that action. The Soviets, it seemed, had counted on surprising us, on disunity in the West and on a sufficient fear of war in the United States to prevent any military response. Having proven them wrong on those counts, we wondered whether their inconsistent positions reflected a possible internal struggle. We joked around the Cabinet table about Khrushchev’s apparently yielding to his hard-liners one day and his peace advocates the next, and about the fact that—because of the time differential and slowness of transmission—we worked all day to send messages they would receive upon waking up and they did exactly the same.

But the eighteen Soviet dry cargo ships still heading toward the quarantine were no joke. Five of these ships with large hatches were being watched with special care. The Executive Committee, in session most of each day, soon knew every Soviet ship by name and which of them were suspected of carrying armaments. Tuesday night, as the ships came on, the tension built. Robert Kennedy was dispatched that night to find out from the Soviet Ambassador whether any instructions had been issued to the Soviet ship captains. He learned nothing. “You fellows who thought the blockade was the most peaceful answer may find out differently pretty soon,” said the President. At our Wednesday morning meeting, held just as the quarantine went into effect, some half-dozen Soviet submarines were reported to have joined these ships. Orders were prepared to sink any subs interfering with the quarantine. In the midst of the same meeting, more news arrived. The Soviet ships nearest Cuba had apparently stopped or altered their course. A feeling of relief went round the table.

The prospects of confrontation at sea were not, however, by any means over. Soviet intentions were not yet clear. The quarantine had not yet been tested. Kennedy told U Thant, in response to the Secretary General’s initial appeal, that the blockade could not be suspended, that “the existing threat was created by the secret introduction of offensive weapons into Cuba, and the answer lies in their removal of such weapons.” (A second U Thant proposal on Friday, negotiated through Stevenson, urging both sides to avoid unnecessary contact during the next few days, was more acceptable, Kennedy simply stating the obvious—that there would be no incidents if Soviet ships stayed away.) Khrushchev summoned a visiting American businessman to tell him that Kennedy should agree to a summit, that conflict in the Caribbean could lead to nuclear war (including the use of the offensive missiles he now admitted were in Cuba) and that Soviet submarines would sink any American vessel forcing a Soviet ship to stop.

At dawn Thursday a Soviet tanker was hailed and, on the instructions of the President—who thought it possible that the tanker had not yet received its instructions from Moscow—passed through the barrier like all nonsuspicious tankers after merely identifying itself. So was an East German passenger ship. At dawn Friday an American-made, Panama-owned, Greek-manned, Lebanese-registered freighter under charter to the Soviet Union was halted and boarded—after the Navy obtained the President’s authorization. His preference had been not to intercept any Soviet ships until necessary, but to have a nonbloc ship under Soviet charter boarded to show we meant business. Inspected by an unarmed boarding party and found to be carrying only trucks and truck parts, the freighter was allowed to pass through.
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The real problem was not Lebanese freighters and Soviet tankers but the Soviet cargo ships and their submarine escorts. They would have to be stopped Friday, said the President, if U Thant’s proposals had not altered their course by then. The Navy was eager to go far out into the ocean to intercept the key Soviet ships. The President, backed by McNamara and Ormsby-Gore and watching the tracking of each ship on a large board in the White House “Situation Room,” insisted that Khrushchev be given all possible time to make and communicate an uncomfortable decision to his ships. In a sharp clash with the Navy, he made certain his will prevailed.

Gradually, rather than dramatically, the good news came in, mixed, in fact, with the “bad” news recounted above. Sixteen of the eighteen Russian ships, including all five with large hatches, were reported Wednesday to have stopped—then to be lying dead in the water or moving in uncertain circles—and, finally, Thursday and Friday to have turned around. “That’s nice,” observed one member of our group. “The Soviets are reacting to us for a change.” U.S. planes followed them all the way back to Soviet ports. A minimum of force had obtained a maximum gain. The value of conventional strength in the nuclear age had been underlined as never before. The quarantine, speculated the President later, “had much more power than we first thought it did because, I think, the Soviet Union was very reluctant to have us stop ships which carried…highly secret and sensitive material.” The Soviet military, he reasoned, long obsessed with secrecy, could not risk letting their missiles, warheads and electronic equipment fall into our hands.

PERIL POINT

The dangers of a naval confrontation had not ended, but at least they had temporarily eased. The dangers posed by the missiles in Cuba, however, were increasing. More of the MRBMs—now hastily camouflaged—were becoming operational, reported McCone at the briefings which began each of our morning meetings. Work was going ahead full speed. All the MRBMs would be operational by the end of the week, with the IRBMs to be ready a month or so later. Throughout Thursday and Friday the President and Executive Committee pondered new ways of stepping up the political, economic and military pressure on the Soviets, including:

1. Tightening the blockade. The addition of missile fuel to the proscribed list already provided a reason to stop tankers, if desired. The next step would be POL, then all commodities other than food and medicine.

2. Increased low-level flights. These would provide not only improved reconnaissance but also a means of harassing the Soviets and humiliating Castro, particularly if nighttime flights with flares were added. The fear of more serious reprisal had stopped Cuban as well as Soviet attempts to down these planes. Their daily operations, moreover, would make more feasible a surprise air strike.

3. Action inside Cuba. The President authorized a leaflet drop directed at the people of Cuba, asked the USIA to prepare it, personally cleared its text and pictures (low-level photographs of the missile sites), ordered it to go ahead and then held it up temporarily. Meanwhile ways of reaching Castro directly were explored once again.

4. Air strike.

5. Invasion. Those who had favored the last two courses the previous week now renewed their advocacy.

The President refused to rush. Preparations for an invasion as well as other military contingencies were still under way. Soviet ships had turned back. Talks were going on at the U.N. But in a message to U Thant, in a White House statement and in a State Department announcement, the continued work on the missile sites was noted in the gravest tones.

The State Department press officer, in making this announcement Friday noon, went beyond the White House position by referring reporters to that passage in the President’s Monday night speech which had said “further action will be justified” if work on the missiles continued. This remark, accompanied by some imprecise Congressional and press speculation, immediately touched off headlines that an invasion or air strike was imminent. For the first time, the President lost his temper. He called the Secretary of State, then the Assistant Secretary, then the press officer, Lincoln White, his voice rising and his language intensifying with each call. This was going to be a prolonged struggle, he argued, requiring caution, patience and as little public pressure on him as possible.

But in the next twenty-four hours he was to joke that White’s error might have had a helpful effect. A new Khrushchev-to-Kennedy letter was received at the State Department Friday evening, October 26—long, meandering, full of polemics but in essence appearing to contain the germ of a reasonable settlement: inasmuch as his missiles were there only to defend Cuba against invasion, he would withdraw the missiles under UN inspection if the U.S. agreed not to invade. Similar talk came the same day in the UN from Zorin to U Thant and, through a highly informal channel, from Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Washington Aleksander Fomin to the ABC-TV correspondent covering the State Department, John Scali. In Khrushchev’s letter the offer was a bit vague. It seemed to vary from one paragraph to the next, and was accompanied by the usual threats and denunciations. Nevertheless it was with high hopes that the Executive Committee convened Saturday morning, October 27, to draft a reply.

In the course of that meeting our hopes quickly faded. A new Khrushchev letter came in, this time public, making no mention of the private correspondence but raising the ante: the Jupiter missiles in Turkey must be removed in exchange. In addition, we learned, Fomin and Zorin were talking about extending the UN inspection to U.S. bases. Had Khrushchev’s hard-liners once again taken the lead, we speculated, or had the appearance of this same swap proposal in Washington and London newspapers encouraged the Soviets to believe we would weaken under pressure? Many Western as well as neutral leaders were, in fact, quick to endorse the new Soviet position. Still another possibility was that the second, public proposal had actually been written first.
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More bad news followed. A new Soviet ship was reported approaching the quarantine zone. The latest photographs showed no indications that missile site work was being held up awaiting our reply to the Friday letter. On the contrary, permanent and expensive installations of nuclear warhead storage bunkers and troop barracks were going ahead rapidly. Khrushchev’s letter, said some, was designed merely to delay and deceive us until the missile installations were complete. Then came the worst news: the first shooting and fatality of the crisis, ground fire on two low-flying reconnaissance planes and the downing of a highflying U-2 by a Soviet-operated SAM. The dead pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., had flown the mission thirteen days earlier which first discovered the missiles.

We had talked earlier in the week of what response this nation would make should an unarmed U.S. plane—on a publicly announced mission of surveillance—be shot down, and had decided tentatively on a single retaliatory strike against a SAM site, then knocking them all out if attacks continued. Now the time had come to implement that policy, killing Soviets in the process, probably flushing Castro’s planes, possibly leading to a full air strike, an invasion or further Soviet ripostes. But the President had been careful not to give blanket authority to carry out this decision to the Air Force in advance; and he preferred not to give it now. He wanted to wait one more day—for more information on what happened to our planes and for Khrushchev’s final negotiating position. He called off the flare-drop flight scheduled for that night (each reconnaissance flight had to be approved individually by the President each day), because of the danger that the flares might be taken for air-to-ground fire from the planes. But he approved an announcement that all necessary measures would be taken “to insure that such missions are effective and protected,” authorized fighter escorts, and ordered the fighters to respond to any MIG attack. He also urged State and Defense officials to prepare for the worst in Berlin, Turkey and Iran, where, in the face of unexpected Allied unity, the expected Soviet counterthrust had not yet occurred.

That same day, to make matters worse, an American U-2 plane over Alaska had encountered navigational difficulties and flown deep into Soviet territory, bringing up a bevy of Soviet fighters but no fire, before regaining its course. The President decided to ignore this incident unless the Soviets publicized it; but he wondered if Khrushchev would speculate that we were surveying targets for a pre-emptive nuclear strike. (Khrushchev did, in fact, write later of the danger of such a plane, “which might have been taken for a nuclear bomber…intruding when everything has been put into combat readiness.”)

Everything was in combat readiness on both sides. The conventional and the nuclear forces of the United States were alerted worldwide. Both air-strike planes and the largest invasion force mounted since World War II were massed in Florida. Our little group seated around the Cabinet table in continuous session that Saturday felt nuclear war to be closer on that day than at any time in the nuclear age. If the Soviet ship continued coming, if the SAMs continued firing, if the missile crews continued working and if Khrushchev continued insisting on concessions with a gun at our head, then—we all believed—the Soviets must want a war and war would be unavoidable.

The President had no intention of destroying the Alliance by backing down, but he thought it all the more imperative that our position be absolutely clear. He decided to treat the latest Khrushchev message as propaganda and to concentrate on the Friday night letter. An impersonal White House statement, issued at 4:30
P.M
., dismissed the Saturday letter with a reference to “inconsistent and conflicting proposals…involving the security of nations outside the Western Hemisphere.” As soon as the present Soviet-created threat is ended, the statement read, sensible negotiations on arms limitations can proceed. A private letter to U Thant also stressed the rapidly approaching point of peril, and asked him to ascertain urgently whether the Soviet Union was willing immediately to cease work on these bases in Cuba and to render the weapons inoperable under UN verification so that various solutions could be discussed.