Life: An Exploded Diagram (20 page)

I
N THE CABINET
Room of the White House, President John F. Kennedy sat, as usual, halfway down the long table, with his back to the tall windows that looked out onto the Rose Garden. On the mantelpiece of the unused fireplace to his right sat a model of the
Mayflower.
Above that, a portrait of George Washington. Hidden in the light fixtures, microphones that fed tape recorders in the White House basement. Of the sixteen men in the room, only JFK and his brother Robert — Bobby — knew the microphones were there.

Two CIA men were in the room: Lundahl was the expert on aerial photography; Graybeal was the expert on Soviet missiles. On the table, mounted on boards, were three large black-and-white aerial photographs of parts of Cuba. They’d been taken, through a powerful zoom lens, from a U-2 spy plane. Lundahl used a wooden pointer to indicate items of interest.

“These are missile trailers, Mr. President. Tent areas over here. This is equipment for erecting launchers.”

The men around the table leaned forward to the pictures.

“Are you sure? To me, uh, I dunno. Looks like it might be just the basement for a farm or something.”

“No, sir,” Lundahl said. “These rectangular objects here? These are medium-range ballistic missile trailers.”

“How do you know that? That these are for medium-range missiles?”

“From their length, Mr. President,” Graybeal said. “They are sixty-seven feet long, precisely the length of the Soviet MRBMs paraded through Moscow last May Day.”

“I see. And the range of these missiles?”

Graybeal said, “Launched from this site in Cuba, they’d come through the roof of this building thirteen minutes later.”

Bobby Kennedy whacked his bunched fist onto the table.

“Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians!”

“Are they ready to be fired?” JFK wanted to know.

“No, sir.”

Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, interrupted. “We have
some
reason to believe that the nuclear warheads are not yet present. And hence that they are not ready to fire.”

JFK looked to the CIA missile man. “Mr. Graybeal?”

“That is correct, Mr. President. Nuclear warheads require specialized storage facilities. We have no photographic evidence that these are in place.”

“So how long have we got? We can’t tell, can we, how long before they could be fired? Before they’re, uh, mated with the warheads?”

McNamara, a man with rimless spectacles and hair like thick black varnish, said, “No. But clearly we do have some time before these missiles are ready.”

General Maxwell Taylor growled, clearing his throat. Taylor was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — in other words, the supremo of the armed forces. He’d parachuted into Normandy during World War II and had fought in Korea. He wasn’t particularly fond of McNamara, whose previous job had been head of the Ford Motor Company. He wasn’t particularly fond of the Kennedys, either.

“I have to disagree, Mr. President. Time is what we do not have. The Soviets clearly have a lot in place. It’s not a question of waiting for extensive concrete launching pads or that sort of thing. They could hit us in days. Weeks, at most. We have to take these bases out
now.
”

“Can we do that with air strikes?”

“Not with one hundred percent certainty, sir, no.”

“I see. So, uh, let’s say we miss a couple of sites. Or leave them functional. Say, two or three Russian MRBMs still ready to fire. What, we lose Miami? Atlanta? Washington?”

Taylor, a soldier, was unhappy about discussing casualties. Especially civilian ones.

He said, “All this would be a preamble to the invasion of Cuba, obviously. We’d have to neutralize . . .”

“Yes,” JFK said. “And are we ready to invade Cuba, General?”

“Our plans are at an advanced stage, Mr. President.”

“That means no, I take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

A pause, then McNamara said, “I don’t know what kind of world we live in after we’ve struck Cuba.”

I’d like to think that the image of a globe of radioactive ash circling the sun might have flashed into the minds of those men at that moment. Maybe it did.

“Okay,” the president said, “we meet again at six thirty. In the meantime, we keep the lid on this thing. No one talks; everyone thinks. That clear?”

“Sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I will fulfill my scheduled engagements. I don’t want the press thinking that anything unusual is going on. General Taylor? Please confer with your Chiefs of Staff. By this evening, I want a realistic assessment of all military options, so far as that’s possible.”

The Kennedy brothers met outside the West Wing of the White House. Two men in sober suits among the white columns. The maples and birches dressed in rich autumnal colors. The sky impossibly blue. Elegant and beautiful things you could not dare risk or surrender. Lovely things suspended against the impending dark.

The Kennedys were young to be burdened with the fate of the world. Elected two years earlier at the age of forty-three, JFK was the youngest-ever president of the United States. Bobby, officially attorney general but in effect deputy president, was thirty-six. Both men would be assassinated by gunmen: JFK in Texas, thirteen months after this conversation; Bobby six years later in California. A shimmery golden haze of martyrdom, of sainthood, almost, has settled upon them.

“The hell is Khrushchev up to, Jack?”

“I dunno, Bobby. He told me they weren’t interested in Cuba. He said that Castro was a kinda wild card.”

“Yeah. The bastard lied to you.”

Kennedy and Khrushchev had met, for the first and only time, at a summit conference in Vienna in June 1961. No two men could be less alike, yet they had one thing in common: neither was quite what he seemed.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was pudgy, porky, bald, and sixty-seven years old. He had been born a peasant, had been a shepherd boy. He liked to boast that he hadn’t learned to read until he was twenty-five. He had extra chins where his neck should have been. When he scowled, he looked like an angry butcher. When he smiled, all chins and gappy teeth, he looked clownish, like the kind of bit-part actor who plays the Cheerful Village Idiot in film comedies. His moods were volatile, unpredictable: the chubby, playful uncle one minute; a ranting, bulge-eyed, desk-banging horror the next. In the Western media, he was often a figure of fun and was a joy to cartoonists.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, by almost ridiculous contrast, was the youthful-faced, smoothly barbered, sharply suited son of a self-made millionaire. He’d studied at Harvard and in London, then won medals for his exploits as a torpedo boat commander in World War II. He’d been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a book called
Profiles in Courage.
He was also the first (and so far the only) Roman Catholic U.S. president. His predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was an aging, uncontroversial, golf-playing ex-general; Kennedy was all about newness and dynamism and bringing America out of the shadows of war into the bright sunlight of . . . well, something different. He was glamorous. His wife, Jacqueline, was also very glamorous. (Jack and Jackie; how could you resist that lovely alliterative coupling, or the golden children it produced?)

From another angle, through a different lens, each of these men becomes something else.

Beneath the fat and the bad suits, behind the histrionics, Khrushchev was as hard as a drill bit and as cunning as a lavatory rat. During World War II, he’d led guerrilla resistance to the German invasion of the Ukraine. He’d clawed his way to the top of the Soviet leadership, a climb with treachery and murder perched on every step. He knew when to lie low, to get forgotten, and when to make his move. He’d survived — and no mean feat, this, because many hadn’t — the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. No one had given him a leg up, a helping hand. In his homely peasant fashion, he’d put his short arm around the shoulders of rivals, who then suddenly disappeared. When Stalin died, there Khrushchev was, somehow first secretary of the Communist Party. The gleeful mourners around Stalin’s coffin looked up and found Nikita in charge.
How’d that happen?
they asked themselves, in Russian.

Kennedy had the style and bearing of a New England aristocrat, but his father, Joe Kennedy, had amassed the family fortune by ruthless swindling and smuggling whiskey. Underneath the cool and the tailored suits, and beyond the photo shoots, JFK was, physically, a mess. He was — forgive the cliché; I like the word
riddled
— riddled by disease. He suffered from bone complaints — osteoporosis and osteoarthritis — which forced him to wear a back brace; he could walk only short distances without experiencing pain. He had a sexually transmitted venereal disease. (I’d like to think that he caught it in Cuba, but that’s maybe too neat.) He suffered from Addison’s disease, which is a rare dysfunction of the adrenal glands. It lent his face a permanent yellowish tan. Colitis affected his bowels, noisily. He had high cholesterol and asthma. And several allergies. For these reasons he was pumped full of drugs much of the time. His weight and the shape of his face varied according to how and when the drugs kicked in. (He doesn’t look quite the same in any two photographs.) It seems that there was no expert medical overview of his medication. The president woke up, gobbled down thirty pills, and then went downstairs in a haze of brain chemistry to take charge of one of the world’s two superpowers and its nuclear arsenal.

JFK was also lecherous. Very lecherous. He once told Harold Macmillan, the courtly prime minister of Great Britain, that he would get migraine headaches if he went three days without a woman. And we’re not talking about the lovely Jackie here, not exclusively. It seems improbable that such a wreck of a man, a man who couldn’t take his shoes and socks off without help, had a string of lovers. But he did.

Somehow the truth about Kennedy stayed out of the public domain. The press was more respectful toward politicians in those days, I guess. Or more afraid of them. Or, possibly, America really needed the fragile glass bubble of Jack and Jackie, that aura of youthful glamour, to remain intact, believable. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I was too busy getting Above Myself, falling in love with a posh girl, ineptly capturing her lovely body in a shadowy barn, to take much notice of what was going on in the real world.

I had, as it happened, only a few more days of ignorance, innocence, left to me.

I digress. I’ve gone off on a tangent again.

Anyway, the fact is — was — that JFK was a very sick man within kissing distance of a career-exploding scandal. It’s likely — no, it’s highly probable — that Nikita Khrushchev knew all of this; the Russians were good at espionage. That may be why, in Vienna, the Russian steamrollered the American. Why Khrushchev lectured, hectored, Kennedy like a bullying schoolmaster humiliating a new boy with a wet patch on his pants.

Later Kennedy would admit that the meeting with Khrushchev was “the roughest thing in my life. He just beat the hell out of me.”

What frightened JFK more than anything was that the Russian leader seemed not to share his dread of nuclear catastrophe. Kennedy had gone to Vienna in the hope that he could persuade the Soviet Union to agree to a ban on the testing of new nuclear weapons. To sign a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Khrushchev was having none of it. In fact, he told Kennedy in no uncertain terms that Russia intended to continue to build its arsenal and that, in the event of a military conflict with the United States, Russia would not hesitate to fire its missiles. Kennedy came back from Vienna badly rattled, convinced that Khrushchev was “a ruthless barbarian.” Not the kind of guy to put nukes into Cuba as a mere bluff.

In America the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the narrative of our brush with extinction, has been mythicized. Retold as a showdown between Freedom and Tyranny, Light and Dark, Good and Evil.

Kennedy’s generation was the first to have had its imagination shaped by movies. It grew up, experienced its major thrills, in cinemas. And the cinemas showed Westerns. It’s
High Noon,
and the Bad Guy in the black hat stands in the middle of the street of the frontier town with a gloved hand poised over his holster and calls out the sheriff, who is the Good Guy and wears a white hat. The sheriff is afraid because he is not as quick on the draw as the Bad Guy, but he does not show his fear because he is the chosen representative of the people, their champion. He is the one who stands between them, their desires for peace and prosperity, and the dark anarchy of the Bad Guy, who will abuse their homes and their wives and daughters. And the Good Guy wins, of course. Even though, sometimes, he is mortally wounded in the process.

Kennedy, in the white hat, won the showdown with Khrushchev, in the black hat. (Or maybe that should be red hat.)

At the time, the version of this myth that established itself was the “eyeball-to-eyeball” variant. The man who put this about was Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk. He saw the world’s glimpse into the burning precipice in terms of the game he’d played as a boy in Georgia, where two kids would stand staring into each other’s face, and the loser was the one who blinked first.